Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0149/01490.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 6KB | 102 lines

$Unique_ID{bob01490}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Sketches, Old And New
Raising Poultry}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{raising
poultry
night

}
$Date{1893}
$Log{}
Title:       Sketches, Old And New
Book:        Raising Poultry
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1893

Raising Poultry

     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 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.

[Footnote *: Being a letter written to a Poultry Society that had conferred a
complimentary membership upon the author.]

     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
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 intested in, the chances
are ninety-nine in a hundred that he secures somebody else's immediate
attention to it to, 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
a-piece, 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 premiscuously, 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 seven o'clock, and I shall be on hand promptly.