- end_line
- 4714
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:47:56.336Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 4647
- text
- where are you? Crow once more, my Bantam! my princely, my imperial
Shanghai! my bird of the Emperor of China! Brother of the sun! Cousin
of great Jove! where are you?--one crow more, and tell me your number!
Hark! like a full orchestra of the cocks of all nations, forth burst
the crow. But where from? There it is; but where? There was no telling,
further than it came from out of the east.
After breakfast I took my stick and sallied down the road. There were
many gentlemen's seats dotting the neighboring country, and I made
no doubt that some of these opulent gentlemen had invested a hundred
dollar bill in some royal Shanghai recently imported in the ship Trade
Wind, or the ship White Squall, or the ship Sovereign of the Seas; for
it must needs have been a brave ship with a brave name which bore the
fortunes of so brave a cock. I resolved to walk the entire country, and
find this noble foreigner out; but thought it would not be amiss to
inquire on the way at the humblest homesteads, whether, peradventure,
they had heard of a lately-imported Shanghai belonging to any gentlemen
settlers from the city; for it was plain that no poor farmer, no poor
man of any sort, could own such an Oriental trophy--such a Great Bell
of St. Paul's swung in a cock's throat.
I met an old man, plowing, in a field nigh the road-side fence.
"My friend, have you heard an extraordinary cock-crow of late?"
"Well, well," he drawled, "I don't know--the Widow Crowfoot has a
cock--and Squire Squaretoes has a cock--and I have a cock, and they all
crow. But I don't know of any on 'em with 'straordinary crows."
"Good-morning to you," said I, shortly; "it's plain that you have not
heard the crow of the Emperor of China's chanticleer."
Presently I met another old man mending a tumble-down old rail-fence.
The rails were rotten, and at every move of the old man's hand they
crumbled into yellow ochre. He had much better let the fence alone, or
else get him new rails. And here I must say, that one cause of the sad
fact why idiocy more prevails among farmers than any other class of
people, is owing to their undertaking the mending of rotten rail-fences
in warm, relaxing spring weather. The enterprise is a hopeless one. It
is a laborious one; it is a bootless one. It is an enterprise to make
the heart break. Vast pains squandered upon a vanity. For how can one
make rotten rail-fences stand up on their rotten pins? By what magic
put pitch into sticks which have lain freezing and baking through sixty
consecutive winters and summers? This it is, this wretched endeavor to
mend rotten rail-fences with their own rotten rails, which drives many
farmers into the asylum.
On the face of the old man in question incipient idiocy was plainly
marked. For, about sixty rods before him extended one of the most
unhappy and desponding broken-hearted Virginia rail-fences I ever
saw in my life. While in a field behind, were a set of young steers,
possessed as by devils, continually butting at this forlorn old fence,
and breaking through it here and there, causing the old man to drop
his work and chase them back within bounds. He would chase them with
a piece of rail huge as Goliath's beam, but as light as cork. At the
first flourish, it crumbled into powder.
"My friend," said I, addressing this woeful mortal, "have you heard an
extraordinary cock-crow of late?"
I might as well as have asked him if he had heard the death-tick. He
stared at me with a long, bewildered, doleful, and unutterable stare,
and without reply resumed his unhappy labors.
What a fool, thought I, to have asked such an uncheerful and
uncheerable creature about a cheerful cock!
- title
- Chunk 7