He led the way back past the forecastle and the cook's galley, and there, in dangerous proximity to the pots and frying pans, they found a coop with some dozen querulous and meditative fowl in it. “I heard them this morning,” said Lydia. “They seemed to wake me with their crowing, and I thought--I was at home!” “I'm very sorry,” said Dunham, sympathetically. He wished Staniford were there to take shame to himself for denying sensibility to this girl. The cook, smoking a pipe at the door of his galley, said, “Dey won't trouble you much, miss. Dey don't gen'ly last us long, and I'll kill de roosters first.” “Oh, come, now!” protested Dunham. “I wouldn't say that!” The cook 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?” “Laws, no!” said the cook. “Fats 'em up.” He went inside, and reappeared with a pan full of scraps of meat and crusts of bread. “Oh, I say!” cried Dunham. “Haven't you got some grain, you know, of some sort; some seeds, don't you know?” “They will like this,” said Lydia, while the cook stared in perplexity. She took the pan, and opening the little door of the coop flung the provision inside. But the fowls were either too depressed in spirit to eat anything, or they were not hungry; they remained in their corner, and merely fell silent, as if a new suspicion had been roused in their unhappy breasts. “Dey'll come, to it,” observed the cook.