University of Virginia Library

MORE DISTINCTION.

MARK TWAIN.

I HAVE become an honorary member of the Western New York Poultry
Society, and my ambition is satisfied.

Seriously, from early youth I have taken an especial interest in the subject
of poultry-raising, and so this membership touches a ready sympathy
in my breast. Even as a school-boy, poultry-raising was a study with me,
and I may say without egotism that as early as the age of seventeen I was
acquainted with all the best and speediest methods of raising chickens, from
raising them off a roost by burning lucifer matches under their noses, down
to lifting them off a fence on a frosty night by insinuating the end of a
warm board under their heels. By the time I was twenty years old, I really
suppose I had raised more poultry than any one individual in all the section
round about there. The very chickens came to know my talent, by-and-by.
The youth of both sexes ceased to paw the earth for worms, and old roosters
that came to crow “remained to pray,” when I passed by.

I have had so much experience in the raising of fowls that I cannot but
think that a few hints from me might be useful to the Society. The two
methods I have already touched upon are very simple, and are only used
in the raising of the commonest class of fowls; one is for Summer, the other
for Winter. In the one case, you start out with a friend along about
eleven o'clock on a Summer's night (not later, because in some States—especially
in California and Oregon—chickens always rouse up just at midnight
and crow from ten to thirty minutes, according to the ease or difficulty
they experience in getting the public waked up), and your friend carries

with him a sack. Arrived at the hen roost (your neighbor's, not your
own), you light a match and hold it under first one and then another pullet's
nose until they are willing to go into that bag without making any trouble
about it. You then return home, either taking the bag with you or leaving
it behind, according as circumstances shall dictate. N. B. I have seen the
time when it was eligible and appropriate to leave the sack behind and
walk off with considerable velocity, without ever leaving any word where
to send it.

In the case of the other method mentioned for raising poultry, your
friend takes along a covered vessel with a charcoal fire in it, and you carry
a long, slender plank. This is a frosty night, understand. Arrived at the
tree, or fence, or other hen-roost (your own, if you are an idiot), you warm
the end of your plank in your friend's fire-vessel, and then 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 conspicnously 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 fire-proof safe, and keep it in the kitchen at night.
The method I speak of is not always a bright and satisfying success, and
yet there are so many little articles of vertu about a kitchen that if you fail
on the coop you can generally bring away something else. I brought away
a nice steel trap, one night, worth ninety cents.

But what is the use in my pouring out my whole intellect on this subject?
I have shown the Western New York Poultry Society that they
have taken to their bosom a party who is not a Spring chicken by any
means, but a man who knows all about poultry, and is just as high up in
the most efficient methods of raising it as the President of the institution
himself. I thank these gentlemen for the honorary membership they have
conferred upon me, and shall stand at all times ready and willing to testify
my good feeling and my official zeal by deeds as well as by this hastily
penned advice and information. Whenever they are ready to go to raising
poultry, let them call for me any evening after eleven o'clock and I shall be
on hand promptly.