Sketches New and Old by Mark Twain

complimentary membership upon the author. Written about 1870.]

Seriously, from early youth I have taken an especial interest in the

subject of poultry-raising, and so this membership touches a ready

sympathy in my breast. Even as a schoolboy, poultry-raising was a study

with me, and I may say without egotism that as early as the age of

seventeen I was acquainted with all the best and speediest methods of

raising chickens, from raising them off a roost by burning lucifer

matches under their noses, down to lifting them off a fence on a frosty

night by insinuating the end of a warm board under their heels. By the

time I was twenty years old, I really suppose I had raised more poultry

than any one individual in all the section round about there. The very

chickens came to know my talent by and by. The youth of both sexes

ceased to paw the earth for worms, and old roosters that came to crow,

“remained to pray,” when I passed by.

I have had so much experience in the raising of fowls that I cannot but

think that a few hints from me might be useful to the society. The two

methods I have already touched upon are very simple, and are only used in

the raising of the commonest class of fowls; one is for summer, the other

for winter. In the one case you start out with a friend along about

eleven o’clock’ on- a summer’s night (not later, because in some states–

especially in California and Oregon–chickens always rouse up just at

midnight and crow from ten to thirty minutes, according to the ease or

difficulty they experience in getting the public waked up), and your

friend carries with him a sack. Arrived at the henroost (your

neighbor’s, not your own), you light a match and hold it under first one

and then another pullet’s nose until they are willing to go into that bag

without making any trouble about it. You then return home, either taking

the bag with you or leaving it behind, according as circumstances shall

dictate. N. B.–I have seen the time when it was eligible and

appropriate to leave the sack behind and walk off with considerable

velocity, without ever leaving any word where to send it.

In the case of the other method mentioned for raising poultry, your

friend takes along a covered vessel with a charcoal fire in it, and you

carry a long slender plank. This is a frosty night, understand. Arrived

at the tree, or fence, or other henroost (your own if you are an idiot),

you warm the end of your plank in your friend’s fire vessel, and then

raise it aloft and ease it up gently against a slumbering chicken’s foot.

If the subject of your attentions is a true bird, he will infallibly

return thanks with a sleepy cluck or two, and step out and take up

quarters on the plank, thus becoming so conspicuously accessory before

the fact to his own murder as to make it a grave question in our minds as

it once was in the mind of Blackstone, whether he is not really and

deliberately, committing suicide in the second degree. [But you enter

into a contemplation of these legal refinements subsequently not then.]

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