Sketches New and Old eBook

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 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 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, they put them in a coop as strong as a fireproof 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.

EXPERIENCE OF THE McWILLIAMSES WITH MEMBRANOUS CROUP

[As related to the author of this book by Mr. McWilliams, a pleasant New York gentleman whom the said author met by chance on a journey.]

Well, to go back to where I was before I digressed to explain to you how that frightful and incurable disease, membranous croup,[Diphtheria D.W.] was ravaging the town and driving all mothers mad with terror, I called Mrs. McWilliams’s attention to little Penelope, and said: 

“Darling, I wouldn’t let that child be chewing that pine stick if I were you.”

“Precious, where is the harm in it?” said she, but at the same time preparing to take away the stick for women cannot receive even the most palpably judicious suggestion without arguing it, that is married women.