CHAPTER XVIII.
_THE MATUTINAL ROOSTER_.
Horatio remarks to Hamlet, "The morning cock crew loud;" and I have no doubt he did; he always does, especially if he is confined during the performance of his vocal exercises to a narrow city yard surrounded by brick walls which act as sounding-boards to carry the vibrations to the ears of a sleeper who is already restless with the summer heat and with the buzzing of early and pertinacious flies.

To such a man, aroused and indignant, there comes a profound conviction that the urban rooster is far more vociferous than his rural brethren; that he can sing louder, hold on longer and begin again more quickly than the bucolic cock who has communed only with nature and known no envious longings to outshriek the morning milkman or the purveyor of catfish.
And he who is thus afflicted perhaps may be justified if he regards "the cock, that trumpet of the morn," as an insufferable nuisance, whose only excuse for existence is that he is pleasant to the eye and the palate when, bursting with stuffing, he lies, brown and crisp, among the gravy, ready for the carving-knife.
But the man who is fortunate enough to dwell in the country during the ardent summer days takes a different and more kindly view of chanticleer.

If he is waked early in the morning by the clarion voice of some neighboring cock, he will not repine, provided he went to bed at a reasonably early hour, for he will hear some music that is not wholly to be despised.

The rooster in the neighboring barn-yard gives out the theme.

His voice is a deep, but broken, bass.