"I am rather proud of it, but I think I did quite as well when it came to the hen.

Anything more aptly answering to the word hen in all its various shades of meaning than the hen itself I don't know, but it took me a full week to reason the thing out.

It was not until I heard its absurd cackling over the laying of a strictly fresh egg, strutting about the barn-yard like a feathered Napoleon Bonaparte, and acting altogether as though she were the winner of a Twentieth Century Marathon race that it dawned on me that the creature was a hen, and could never be anything else than a hen.

Mother wished me to call her an omelette, the feminine form of an om, as she expressed it, but I had already named the rooster, and the bird seemed so exactly like a rooster that I declined to make any changes." "I don't see," put in Uncle Zib at this point, "where you got the word hen from.

That is the wonder of it to my mind." "Oh," laughed Adam, "that was easy, my dear Zib.