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raise it aloft and ease it up gently against a slumbering chicken's foot.
If the subject of your attentions is a true bird, he will infallibly
return thanks with a sleepy cluck or two, and step out and take up
quarters on the plank, thus becoming so conspicuously accessory before
the fact to his own murder as to make it a grave question in our minds as
it once was in the mind of Blackstone, whether he is not really and
deliberately committing suicide in the second degree. [But you enter
into a contemplation of these legal refinements subsequently-- not then.]
When you wish to raise a fine, large, donkey-voiced Shanghai rooster, you
do it with a lasso, just as you would a bull. It is because he must be choked,
and choked effectually, too. It is the only good, certain way,
for whenever he mentions a matter which he is cordially interested in,
the chances are ninety-nine in a hundred that he secures somebody else's
immediate attention to it too, whether it be day or night.
The Black Spanish is an exceedingly fine bird and a costly one.
Thirty-five dollars is the usual figure, and fifty a not uncommon price
for a specimen. Even its eggs are worth from a dollar to a dollar and a
half apiece, and yet are so unwholesome that the city physician seldom or
never orders them for the workhouse. Still I have once or twice procured
as high as a dozen at a time for nothing, in the dark of the moon. The
best way to raise the Black Spanish fowl is to go late in the evening and
raise coop and all. The reason I recommend this method is that, the
birds being so valuable, the owners do not permit them to roost around
promiscuously, but put them in a coop as strong as a fireproof safe and
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