Thus the poet elegantly styles him:
... the crested cock, whose clarion sounds
The silent hours.
A neighbouring gentleman one summer had lost most of his
chickens by a sparrow-hawk, that came gliding down between a
faggot-pile and the end of his house to the place where the coops
stood. The owner, inwardly vexed to see his flock thus
diminishing, hung a setting net adroitly between the pile and the
house, into which the caitiff dashed and was entangled.
Resentment suggested the law of retaliation; he therefore clipped
the hawk's wings, cut off his talons, and, fixing a cork on his bill,
threw him down among the brood-hens. Imagination cannot paint
the scene that ensued; the expressions that fear, rage, and revenge
inspired, were new, or at least such as had been unnoticed before:
the exasperated matrons upbraided, they execrated, they insulted,
they triumphed. In a word, they never desisted from buffeting their
adversary till they had torn him in an hundred pieces.
Letter XLIV
To The Honourable Daines Barrington
Selborne.
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