The oldest of these unhappy survivors had come up the mountain tied to a pack-saddle, and consequently was more than six years old. He was big of frame and tawny of color, and had long, sharp spurs curved like small powder-horns, and his crow when he was in good health proclaimed him the leader of the flock. The other five cocks, although but a trifle younger, belonged to the next generation, for they came of the first summer's hatching. Their plumage was red and black, and their long, sweeping tail-feathers cased in ice would certainly have been snapped off if they had had the least power to move their bodies. As the ice melted from their heads, they looked about the house with their round red eyes, and otherwise lay quite helpless on their sides, their claws drawn up to their crops, and curved as they had been taken from the limbs. The soldiers looked on, full of sympathy, and fed their patients now and then with a small portion of warm pudding; and finally, remembering their medicine-chest, which they had never yet had occasion to use, they waited patiently until the ice melted, so that they could handle the fowls without danger of breaking, and then they held each rooster up by the neck and dosed him with a spoonful of whisky and quinine. Following this prescription they laid the old birds in a row on a warm blanket, sufficiently elevating their heads, and covering them up to their bills, and left them to sleep and sweat after the most approved hospital practice. And now, having done their duty by the living, they went outside to look at the dead, which were, if possible, more beautiful than ever. The sun was unusually warm, and by this time everything was dripping and glittering in the light, which was half blinding, and the thin ice was snapping everywhere as the lightened limbs sought to regain their natural positions. As to the dead fowls, a few had fallen to the ground, but most of them remained rigidly perched on the great limbs, dripping a shower of raindrops upon the ice below. Here and there, where a few rays of the sun had found passage to a particular limb, a section of the icy coating had turned so that a half-dozen fowls hung heads downward, or the casing of a hen had melted, while her claws were still frozen fast, leaving her to lop over against her neighbor for support. By afternoon they began to fall off the branches like ripened fruit, and drop on the ground with a thud like apples in an orchard on a windy day. It was a dismal sound in the ears of the three soldiers, and a sad sight to see the heaps of dead fowls as they accumulated on the ground.