and Lydia stared at him in equal surprise.

"Well," answered the cook, "I'll kill the hens first, den. It don't
make any difference to me which I kill. I dunno but de hens is
tenderer." He smoked in a bland indifference.

"Oh, hold on!" exclaimed Dunham, in repetition of his helpless
protest.

Lydia stooped down to make closer acquaintance with the devoted birds.
They huddled themselves away from her in one corner of their prison,
and talked together in low tones of grave mistrust. "Poor things!"
she said. As a country girl, used to the practical ends of poultry,
she knew as well as the cook that it was the fit and simple destiny
of chickens to be eaten, sooner or later; and it must have been less
in commiseration of their fate than in self-pity and regret for the
scenes they recalled that she sighed. The hens that burrowed yesterday
under the lilacs in the door-yard; the cock that her aunt so often
drove, insulted and exclamatory, at the head of his harem, out
of forbidden garden bounds; the social groups that scratched and
descanted lazily about the wide, sunny barn doors; the anxious
companies seeking their favorite perches, with alarming outcries,
in the dusk of summer evenings; the sentinels answering each other
from farm to farm before winter dawns, when all the hills were
drowned in snow, were of kindred with these hapless prisoners.

Dunham was touched at Lydia's compassion. "Would you like--would you
like to feed them?" he asked by a happy inspiration. He turned to the
cook, with his gentle politeness: "There's no objection to our feeding
them, I suppose?"