“We believe it, we believe every word,” said the pigeons, and they flew down, cooing, to the farm-yard and exclaimed—
“Have you heard about the hen?”
“The hen! why people now say there are two hens who have plucked off all their feathers, yet one of them is not like the first, who did not wish to be seen, for she has positively tried to attract the attention of everybody.”
“It was a daring game; however they caught cold, and are both dead from a fever.”
“Wake up! wake up!” crowed the cock as he flew out of the henhouse to the palings. Sleep was still in his eyes, yet he stood and crowed lustily.
“Listen,” said the hen. “There is a cock in the next farm who has unluckily lost three of his wives, they had plucked off all their feathers and died of cold.”
“Go away,” he exclaimed. “I will not hear it, it is an ugly story. Send it away.”
“Send it away!” hissed the bat, while the hens cackled and the cock crowed.
“Send it away! send it away!” and so the story flew from one farm-yard to another, until it came back at last to the place where the original circumstance occurred.
“There are five hens,” thus now ran the story, “who have plucked off all their feathers, at least so they say,” and it made the cock so unhappy that he became quite thin. And he has pecked himself so dreadfully ever since from indignation and shame, till at last he fell down and died, covered with blood. For these hens had not only disgraced his family, but occasioned a great loss to his owner.
And the hen who had really lost the one feather naturally could not recognise her own story, but she was a sensible, worthy hen, and she said—
“I despise these cackling hens; however, there shall be no more tittle-tattle of this sort. When people have a secret among themselves to gossip about in future, I will find it out, and send it to the newspapers, so that it may travel through the whole land and be heard of by everybody.”
“This will just serve these cackling hens and their families right.”
And the newspapers took it up and so altered the wonderful story, that at the last “It was actually true”—One little feather had become five hens!
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