Having made their tour of inspection along the whole line of coops, penetrating with no little difficulty the dense mass which thronged around admiring the committee, (N. B.—The comma after "committee" should be after "admiring!") unanimously agreed to recommend that a premium be awarded to S. Southwick, of Danvers, for his seven well-prepared coops of excellent fowls, containing specimens, "in good order and well conditioned," of Brahmapootras, Red Shanghaes, Black Spanish, and Black Bantams, White Poland ducks and China ducks, all in first-rate keeping, and fully justifying the wish of the committee that they could be present with sharp teeth and sharper appetite, and, hearing what Byron calls

"the all-soft'ning, overpowering knell, The tocsin of the soul-the dinner-bell,"

sit down at the "festive board," with

"clang of plates, of knife and fork,

And merciless fall, like tomahawk to work,"-Peter Pindar,

on just such samples, "done brown on both sides "-claws uppermost, and bellies all dilate with a spicy compound of bread and sweet marjoram. Your committee, believing themselves fully adequate to such an occasion, would do the feast as ample justice as did the Trojans in Italy when their ravenous appetite carried them to such an extreme that their youthful leader, Ascanius, exclaimed,

"Heus, etiam mensas consumimus."-Virgil.

Which one of your committee, an old pedagogue, interprets to

mean,

"Halloo, my lads! your appetites, so rare,

Bolt meats and bread, nor e'en the tables spare.”

Also to Charles Barker, of Andover, a premium for his half-breed wild geese.

These were as splendid birds as ever

"gabbled o'er the pool,

When noisy children are let loose from school."

— Goldsmith transposed.

And, besides that, were beautiful and touching illustrations of the omnipotent tyranny of love over the wildest wanderers of wild-goosedom.

"Quis enim modus adsit amori?"-Virgil.

"What limit to the power of love?" Shakspeare says,

What man or gander can oppose a breast adamantine enough to stop a single bolt from Cupid's bow? Your committee, in their day, have had experience of some pretty tough samples of goose-breast, but none whose

"tough, impracticable heart,

Was proof against great Cupid's dart."-Old Poem.

These birds, too, proved conclusively that Tom Moore had more poetry than truth in his noddle when he sang,

"The bird let loose in Eastern skies,

When hastening fondly home,

Ne'er stoops to earth his wing, nor flies

Where idle warblers roam."

Since here, "visible to the naked eye," was a slap-in-the-mouth contradiction thereof; for

"from his aerial career,

A monarch of goosedom, stern, long-necked and high,-Street varied,

allured by the siren hiss and quack of some seductive voice, sweetly sibillating, in dulcet notes,—

"O goosey, goosey gander,

Whither do you wander?"

stoops down to earth and

"Stamps an image of himself,

A sovereign of a frog pond.”—Dryden varied.

But our love-striken gander was not without high precedent and classic example in his amorous dallying with a daughter of earth. Great Jove, the Thunderer, himself, the Greek mythologists tell us, assumed the shape of a swan, and descended to earth to greet fair Leda,

"Sparta's beauteous queen."

Hear what poor old Jack Falstaff says, in the "Merry Wives of Windsor: ".

"O powerful love! You once, O Jupiter, were a swan for the love of Leda! O omnipotent love! How near the god drew to the complexion of a goose! Think on't, O Jove! a fault in the semblance of a fowl! a foul fault!"

Now, every schoolboy, not wholly oblivious of his Horace, knows that this same Leda, after this visit, laid a couple of splendid eggs, from which were hatched those splendid fellows, Castor and Pollux, redoubtable knock-down heroes in their time, and now fixed in constellation among the starry host. And if these things were so, (and who dare say they were not, against the august authority of Hesiod and Homer, and Horace and Ovid, and Jack Falstaff,) who can blame an honest, simple-hearted gander for taking the great god for a leader, when the great god himself had a Leda (leader?) of his own following?

But, leaving the delightful and seductive fields of classic lore, let us proceed with our report.

To E. G. Berry, of North Danvers, for his bantam hen, with her three broods of chickens, all of the present "year of grace" 1854, she having hatched no fewer than twenty-six chicks at her three several settings. Now, here is a bantam

as is a bantam," an example to all clucking hendom for persistent practice in the vocation whereunto she was born. Surely, if the younglings had been asked, '

know you are out?" they must have given a negative reply; for what mother's memory could be equal to knowing it of such a multitude?

To E. C. Bartlett, of Lawrence, for his bantam cock, accompanied by eight chicks, which said tender and chicken-hearted cock cared for, brooded over, fed, nursed and reared, when forsaken by their unnaturally cruel mother, who had scarcely "found them out" of the shell when she forsook them to the cold charity of an unfeeling world. And yet in justice to her it must be said, that, if cold in her affections, she was warm in her ovarium; since, immediately on hatching and deserting her brood, she returned to her nest and became fertilely parturient and oviparous. Instances of this paternal maternity are not uncommon in the gallinaceous race. In the July number of the "Cottage Gardener," (1854,) an excellent work, published in London, mention is made of a brooding Shanghae cock which took charge of a brood of chicks whose mother left them at a fortnight old. In the August number of the same work two young cockerels are noticed, which were brooding Dorking, Chittiprat, Spanish and Cochin chickens, from three weeks to two months old. And in the September number a correspondent speaks of a white Shanghae cock, to whose care some chicks were delivered as an experiment, and who clucked and called and scratched for and fed them with the greatest care, carrying them on his back and comforting them in every possible way by day, and at night brooding them under his wings. The reverse of this, in the crowing of hens, is also not uncommon. The writer remembers one among some hens kept in Boston by his father. So then we have cock-hens and hencocks; and Nature is not always true to herself; though that is

her affair, and not ours; and if she chooses to let the hen occasionally "wear the breeches" and crow, and

"Mothers monsters prove,"

and if she permits the cock to become tender-hearted, and warmbreasted, and philoprogenitive, and a nursing father, gentle as a "sucking dove," the committee have nothing to say against it. We say nothing of the practical good to be derived from an extensive cultivation of fancy birds of any sort; yet, as a pleasant accompaniment about the house and barn, equally interesting to the "old folks at home" and to the "bonnie bairns" about the homestead, nothing surpasses the race of the Columbida; and they have been kept and cosseted in all time, and consecrated as emblems of innocence, harmlessness and peace, disposed to "rough and tumble" only in their They are almost sacred birds, and seem to have been so regarded from the earliest antiquity. Noah, after his forty days' wandering upon a "sea without a shore," where

"Angels did tire their wings, but found no spot whereon to rest,"-Byron,

felt his first flush of hope when his returning dove brought the olive token in its mouth. So, too, throughout the records of the first dispensation, we find them chosen offerings in the temple services of the Jews; and in the second, and perfected, and crowning dispensation of God to man, the dove was the sacred emblem of the Holy Spirit, resting upon the well-beloved Son when

"O'er his head, that humbly bent,

The Baptist poured the wave."-Fletcher.

Equally, too, was it held in veneration by the Gentile nations; and the poetry of Greece and Rome is filled with allusions to the dove, and always, as in the sacred writings, as emblematic of affection, innocence, and love.

Glorious old Virgil, who, in the midst of a corrupt, and debauched, and licentious age, wrote not a line " which, dying, he could wish to blot," and whose poetry we put, without hesitation, into the hands of our children at school, has made frequent allusions to the dove, and always in a delightful way. Who can forget what Melibus says to Tityrus ?—