“Do you reckon it’s sick?” suggested Betty, and she came to my cage and looked at me attentively.

“Reckon it’s hungry, you mean,” growled her father, who was in one corner of the kitchen cleaning his gun.

“She never feeds it any more,” commented the mother.  “What’s the use of keeping it?  I’d wring its neck and be done with it.  Betty don’t keer a straw for it.”

“Yes, I do,” cried the little girl.  “I’ll get it something to eat this very minute.”

These spasms of attention only lasted a day or two, however, when my young keeper would lapse into carelessness, and again I would be allowed to go with an empty crop and a dry throat.  My beautiful plumage grew rusty from this irregularity and continual neglect, and although I am not a vain bird, my dingy appearance was a source of daily grief and mortification to me.  When Betty was not too busy playing she sometimes hung my cage outside the door of the cottage, but often for days together through the pleasant summer I was left hanging in the kitchen, sometimes half-choked with smoke or dampened with steam.  No wonder I drooped and ceased my cheerful song.

The days when I was put out of doors were indeed gala days to me.  Many families of young chickens lived in the back yard, and the pipings of the little ones and the scoldings of the mothers when their children ran too far away from them, were always amusing to listen to and gave me something to think about which kept my mind off my own troubles.

I liked to watch the hens with their fuzzy broods tumbling about them, or with the older chicks when they scratched the ground and ceaselessly clucked for them to come to get their share of what was turned up in the soil; meanwhile they kept a sharp lookout with their bright eyes to see that no outsider shared in the feast.  And how angrily did they drive it away should a chick from another brood heedlessly rush in among them to get a taste.

One old hen in particular interested me very much.  I noticed her first because of her pretty bluish color and the dark markings around her neck, but I soon came to pity her, for she made herself quite unhappy and seemed to take no comfort in anything.  She was usually tied to a tree by the leg, and although her string was long it seemed always just a little too short to reach the thing she wanted.  To make matters worse she had a bad fashion of rushing wildly around the tree and getting her string wound up shorter and shorter until at last she could not stir a step, but would hang by one foot foolishly pulling as hard as she could.  It always seemed to me that her chickens were more disobedient than the rest, because they knew she could not get to them nor follow them.

Joe sometimes slyly threw pebbles at this blue hen to scare her and make her jump and pull at the string, when he thought his mother was not looking.  As pay for his sport he often got his ears cuffed, for though his mother did not seem to notice how cruelly he teased me, she would not allow him to frighten her fowls.