Dame Penny had a sunny little coop with a padlocked door for her, and she always locked it very carefully every night.  So it was doubly perplexing when the hen disappeared.  Dame Penny remembered distinctly locking the coop-door; several circumstances had served to fix it on her mind.  She had started out without her overshoes, then had returned for them because the snow was quite deep and she was liable to rheumatism.  Then Dame Louisa who lived next door had rapped on her window, and she had run in there for a few moments with the hen-coop key dangling on its blue ribbon from her wrist, and Dame Louisa had remarked that she would lose that key if she were not more careful.  Then when she returned home across the yard a doubt had seized her, and she had tried the coop-door to be sure that she had really fastened it.

[Illustration:  THE SNOW WAS QUITE DEEP.]

The next morning when she fitted the key into the padlock and threw open the door, and no silver hen came clucking out, it was very mysterious.  Dame Louisa came running to the fence which divided her yard from Dame Penny’s, and stood leaning on it with her apron over her head.

“Are you sure that hen was in the coop when you locked the door?” said she.

“Of course she was in the coop,” replied Dame Penny with dignity.  “She has never failed to go in there at sundown for all the twenty-five years that I’ve had her.”

Dame Penny carefully searched everywhere about the premises.  When the scholars assembled she called the school to order, and told them of her terrible loss.  All the scholars crooked their arms over their faces and wept, for they were very fond of Dame Penny, and also of the silver hen.  Every one of them wore one of her silver tail-feathers in the best bonnet, or hat, as the case might be.  The silver hen had dropped them about the yard, and Dame Penny had presented them from time to time as rewards for good behavior.

After Dame Penny had told the school, she tried to proceed with the usual exercises.  But in vain.  She whipped one little boy because he said that four and three made seven, and she stood a little girl in the corner because she spelled hen with one n.

Finally she dismissed the scholars, and gave them permission to search for the silver hen.  She offered the successful one the most beautiful Christmas present he had ever seen.  It was about three weeks before Christmas.

The children all put on their things, and went home and told their parents what they were going to do; then they started upon the search for the silver hen.  They searched with no success till the day before Christmas.  Then they thought they would ask Dame Louisa, who had the reputation of being quite a wise woman, if she knew of any more likely places in which they could hunt.