MASTER BILDERBACK’S POULTRY YARD.

IF there was anything she abominated more than one thing, Mrs. Bilderback used to say with some warmth, it was another, and that was chickens. And she resolutely protested against keeping any of them about the place. She wanted to keep a few flowers this year, and she wasn’t going to be mortified again as she was last Summer, by having every woman who called at that house smile at the forest of bare stalks and scraggy branches that stood for the collection of house plants that she and her daughter tried to raise for ornaments to the place, but which were really of no use except to fill the crops of a lot of long-legged, hungry chickens. And for a long time the good lady held out stoutly against the chicken proposition, but was at last over-argued and over-persuaded and gave her unwilling consent for Master Bilderback to keep three dozen chickens, the party of the second part binding himself to keep the table supplied with fresh eggs and spring chickens, and to keep all hens, roosters, and all young chickens of unknown sex, but of sufficient physical development to scratch, out of the front yard and away from the flower beds. This contract Master Bilderback placed himself under heavy bonds to carry out, by saying, “honest injun,” “’pon nonnor,” and “’cross my heart,” and having solemnly repeated this awful and impressive formula, he went sedately out of the room and immediately threw himself down on a verbena bed, where he pounded the ground with his heels in the ecstasy of his joy. In due time the new hen-house was completed, and Mr. Bilderback, breathing maledictions on the wretches who pulled the pickets off his front fence for kindling wood, had that important boundary repaired before he noticed that the apertures in the fence corresponded to certain neat looking improvements on the hennery. The house was stocked rather slowly, for it was part of the contract which Mrs. Bilderback had drawn that the party of the second part should purchase his own stock. It was noticeable that Master Bilderback’s taste ran greatly toward gamey looking roosters, and as the perches in the hennery became more and more populated, the outlook for fresh eggs and spring chickens became very discouraging indeed. The first fowl the poulterer brought home was a gaunt Hamburg with one eye and a game leg, but beautifully spangled, which interesting bird, Master Bilderback informed his sister, was the worst pill in the box and had lost his eye while fighting a cow. The next day he traded a pocketful of marbles for a little bantam that crowed twenty-four hours a day, could slip through a season crack in a warped board, and could dig a hole in the middle of a flower bed that you could bury a calf in. There wasn’t a moment’s silence about the house after the bantam’s arrival, for when he was not fighting the Hamburg, which was only when that valiant but prudent bird got up on top of the house and hid behind a chimney, he was wandering through the house trying his voice in the different rooms, or standing on the front porch issuing proclamations of defiance to all roosters to whom these presents might come, greeting. A day or two after the bantam’s arrival Master Bilderback traded his knife for a Black Spanish rooster with a broken wing. The Spaniard when put in the coop proceeded at once to clean out the disheartened Hamburg, who fought on the tactics which had so often proved of so great value to him, and amazed his furious antagonist by the briskness with which he got out of the coop, up on to the barn, and perched himself on the restless and uncertain weather-cock. The Spaniard and the bantam then had it until neither of them could stand, when the pacific Hamburg improved the opportunity to come down and partake of the first square meal he had eaten since the new boarders had come to the house. Two days later, Master Bilderback brought home a vile looking white rooster with no tail feathers, his comb shaved off close to the head, and spurs as long as your thumb, a vile plebeian of a rooster without a line of pedigree, of no particular strain, except a strain that made his very eyes turn red when he growled, which he had bought for an old base ball club. But the nameless stranger amazed the proprietor of the hennery by waltzing into the establishment with a terrific rooster oath, and following it up by kicking the bantam clear out of his mind, jerking the wattles off the Spaniard, and chasing the persecuted Hamburg half-way up the side of the house. This was the last addition made to the happy family for some time, Mr. Bilderback declaring that he was not going to have his premises turned into a cock-pit, and Master Bilderback was sternly forbidden to arrange any more meetings in the alley, with other boys and their birds. But a few days afterward, when Master Bilderback came home from school, it was evident that he had made a trade. He had some other boy’s shabby old hat on his head, and there wasn’t a lead pencil, piece of string, pistol cartridge, top, fish-hook, chalk line, marble, dime novel, or street car ticket in his pockets, and he had a new rooster, the crowning glory of the vast collection of fowls that were to furnish forth his mother’s table with fresh eggs and spring chickens. It was a Shanghai; young one, Master Bilderback said, as he prepared to untie its legs and wings and introduce it to its new home; hadn’t got his growth yet, but he was “a buster.” And Mrs. Bilderback thought he was. When he was untied he stood up and flapped one of his wings in his proprietor’s face, until that young gentleman was ready to “cross his heart,” that somebody had hit him with a clapboard. And before he had recovered from the effects of this blow the noble bird kicked him under the chin and darted off toward the front yard, with prodigious strides. He uttered a most awful croak as he neared Mrs. Bilderback, who was trying to get out of his way, and in a vain attempt to fly over her, he struck her on the head, just abaft her ear with his heel, gently dropping her; “grassed the old lady,” Master Bilderback afterward explained to his sister, “like a shot.” The wretched bird paused as he passed the sitting-room window, which was just about on a level with his head when he stooped, to look in and make some unintelligible remark in a guttural tone of language, and snatching up a new tidy that Miss Bilderback was at work upon, swallowed it and passed on. Wherever he trod, he smashed a house plant, and whenever he croaked, he threw somebody into a fit. He met Mr. Bilderback as he suddenly turned the corner of the house, ran against the old gentleman with a wild kind of a crow that sounded like a steamboat whistle with a bad cold, and as he trampled over that good man’s prostrate form, he plucked off his necktie and swallowed it. Then the “buster” wheeled around and straddled into the sitting-room window, and before they could head him out of the house he swallowed two spools of cotton, a tack hammer, a set of false teeth belonging to Mrs. Bilderback, a cake of toilet soap, a shoe buttoner, a ball of yarn, an arctic over-shoe, and finally choked on a photograph album which flew open when it was about half-way down. The bird when last heard from was still at large roaming around South Hill, but Master Bilderback’s hennery is empty and lonesome, because his parents are, from some unaccountable reason, bitterly prejudiced against keeping chickens.