Excerpt from The Chicken Market: And Other Fairy Tales
Suddenly, through the splashing of the rain, light shone from their owner’s countenance. Sore hunger, prompter of his wit, reminded him that he knew, as every man may know, one sentence, at least, of the speech of hens. The hint given him from the basket at the outset of his journey, which it had then suited his humour to consider English, belonged naturally to one of the languages of the great Poultry Stock, and was, in fact, Hennish for I am about to lay an egg. Where, he cried, in his stomach, is that egg? For eggs are good to eat, and I am desperately hungry. There was a flutter in the basket, followed by a delicate rap on his elbow. Was that a mouse running down his sleeve? The egg was in his hand. Pah said the countryman the egg’s alive It can’t be eatable. But Ben Ody put the two ends of the egg to his lips, and found one cold, the other hot. Right enough 1 he thought. So he made fer himself a hole in the small end, sucked thereat, and was’nearly choked before he knew that what he swallowed was tobacco-smoke. What wonder? Again and again had he prophesied to Goody, and said, Goody, we shall have the poultry copying the puppies, and the chickens will soon learn to smoke before they break the shell. How this young embryo came by his cigars was only one out of a thousand mysteries of the tobacco trade.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
