_Chantecler_ finds himself in a trying situation when he comes into the gathering at the _guinea hen's_ five o'clock tea, to meet the pompous, overbearing cocks representing the various governments. When he arrives in the midst of these distinguished society people, he is plied with the query, "How do you sing? Do you sing the Italian school or the French school or the German school?" Poor _Chantecler_, in the simplicity of his idealism, replies, "I don't know how I sing, but I know why I sing." Why need the chanteclers know how they sing? They represent the truth, which needs no stylish clothes or expensive feathers. That is the difference between truth and falsehood. Falsehood must deck herself out beyond all semblance of nature and reality. _Chantecler._ I say ... 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.... 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! The _Game Cock_ appears. He greets _Chantecler_ with the announcement that he is the Champion fighter, that he has killed so and so many Cocks in one day and an equal number on other occasions. _Chantecler_ replies simply, "I have never killed anything. But as I have at different times succored, defended, protected this one and that, I might perhaps be called, in my fashion, brave." The fight begins. _Chantecler_ is wounded and about to succumb, when suddenly all the guests present rush to _Chantecler_ for protection: the common enemy, the _Hawk_ is seen to approach. _Chantecler_ mistakes the cowardice of those who come to seek his aid, for friendship; but the moment the danger is over, the crowd again circles around the fighters, inciting the _Game Cock_ to kill _Chantecler_. But at the critical moment the _Game Cock_ mortally wounds himself with his own spurs, and is jeered and driven off the scene by the same mob that formerly cheered him on. _Chantecler_, weak and exhausted from loss of blood, disillusioned and stung to the very soul, follows the _pheasant hen_ to the Forest. Soon he finds himself a henpecked husband: he may not crow to his heart's content any more, he may not wake the sun, for his lady love is jealous. The only time he can crow is when her eyes are closed in sleep.