A BIG FEATHER-FOOTED COCK [_Pushing the_ CHINA COCK _aside._] Me! I have cauliflowers sprouting at my heels! CHANTECLER Each is in one the show and Mr. Barnum! ALL [_Parading and filing past the_ PEACOCK.] See my beak! See my feet! See my feathers! CHANTECLER [_Suddenly shouting at them._] Lo! While you hold your costume contest, a Scarecrow gives you his blessing! [_Behind them, in fact, the wind has lifted the arms of the_ SCARECROW, _which loosely wave above the pageant._] ALL [_Starting back._] What? CHANTECLER Behold this dummy talking to that lay-figure! [_While the wind blows through the flapping rags._] What say the trousers, dancing their limp fandango? They say, “We were once the fashion!” And, terror of the titlark, what says the old hat which a beggar would none of? “I was the fashion!” And the coat? “I was the fashion!” And the tattered sleeves, that no one has care to mend, try to clasp the Wind, whom they take for the Fashion, and drop back empty--The Wind has passed, the Wind is far! THE PEACOCK [_To the animals slightly dismayed by this address._] You poor-spirited creatures, that thing cannot talk! CHANTECLER Man says the same of us. THE PEACOCK [_To the birds nearest to him._] He is vexed because of those Cocks whom I introduced. [_To_ CHANTECLER, _ironically._] What, my dear sir, do you say to these resplendent gentlemen? CHANTECLER I say, my dear sir, that these resplendent gentlemen are manufactured wares, the work of merchants with highly complex brains, who to fashion a ridiculous Chicken have taken a wing from that one, a topknot from this. I say that in such Cocks nothing remains of the true Cock. They are Cocks of shreds and patches, idle bric-a-brac, fit to figure in a catalogue, not in a barnyard with its decent dunghill and its dog. I say that those befrizzled, beruffled, bedeviled Cocks were never stroked and cherished by Nature’s maternal hand. I say that it’s all Aviculture, and Aviculture is flapdoodle! And I say that those preposterous parrots, without style, without beauty, without form, whose bodies have not even kept the pleasing oval of the egg they were hatched from, look like so many desperate fowls escaped from some hen-coop of the Apocalypse! A COCK My dear sir-- CHANTECLER [_With rising spirit._] And I add that the whole duty of a Cock is to be an embodied crimson cry! And when a Cock is not that, it matters little that his comb be shaped like a toadstool, or his quills twisted like a screw, he will soon vanish and be heard of no more, having been nothing but a variety of a variety! A COCK I protest--