Hens must have a depression where the bump of locality should be, for they have no manner of tenderness for old haunts. "Where are the birds in last year's nests?" queries the poet; but he might have asked quite as pertinently, "Where are the birds in last month's nests?" Echo, if she were at all familiar with the subject, would reply, "The birds are all right, but where are the nests?" Hens very sensibly decide that it is easier to build a new house than to keep the old one in order; and having laid one round of eggs, off they go to erect, or rather to excavate, another dwelling. You have scarcely learned the way to their nook above the great beam when it is abandoned, and they betake themselves to a hole at the very bottom of the haystack. I wish I could tell you a story about a Hebrew prophet crawling under a barn after hen's eggs, and crawling out again from the musty darkness into sweet light with his clothes full of cobwebs, his eyes full of dust, his hands full of eggs, to find himself winking and blinking in the midst of a party of ladies and gentlemen who had come lion-hunting from a farre countrie. I cannot tell you, because it would be a breach of confidence; but I am going to edit my Sheikh's Life and Letters, if I live long enough, and he does not live too long, and then you shall have the whole story, with names, dates, and costumes. Another very singular habit hens have, of dusting themselves. They do not seem to care for bathing, like canary-birds; but in warm afternoons, when they have eaten their fill, they like to stroll into the highway, where the dust lies ankle-deep in heaps and ridges, and settle down and stir and burrow in it till it has penetrated through all their inmost feathers, and so filled them, that, when they arise and shake themselves, they stand in a cloud of dust. I do not like this habit in the hens; yet I observe how a correspondence exists in all the Vertebrata; for do not fine ladies similarly dust themselves? They do not, indeed, sit in the road _a la Turque_. They box up the dust, and take it to their dressing-rooms, and, because Nature has not provided them with feathers, ingenuity more than supplies the deficiency with the softest of white down brushes, that harbor and convey the coveted dust. I doubt not through the races one resembling purpose runs; and many a stately matron and many a lovely maiden might truly say unto the hen, "Thou art my sister." Did I say I knew all about hens? The half was not told you, for I am wise about chickens too. I know their tribe from "egg to bird," as the country people say, when they wish to express the most radical, sweeping acquaintance with any subject,--a phrase, by the way, whose felicity is hardly to be comprehended till experience has unfolded its meaning.