Short Stories and Essays (from Literature and Life)

I.

When you have a theory of any kind, proofs of it are apt to seek you out, and I, who am rather fond of my faith in New England’s influence of this sort, had as pretty an instance of it the day after my arrival as I could wish. A colored brother of Massachusetts birth, as black as a man can well be, and of a merely anthropoidal profile, was driving me along shore in search of a sea-side hotel when we came upon a weak-minded young chicken in the road. The natural expectation is that any chicken in these circumstances will wait for your vehicle, and then fly up before it with a loud screech; but this chicken may have been overcome by the heat (it was a land breeze and it drew like the breath of a furnace over the hay-cocks and the clover), or it may have mistimed the wheel, which passed over its head and left it to flop a moment in the dust and then fall still. The poor little tragedy was sufficiently distressful to me, but I bore it well, compared with my driver. He could hardly stop lamenting it; and when presently we met a young farmer, he pulled up. “You goin’ past Jim Marden’s?” “Yes.” “Well, I wish you’d tell him I just run over a chicken of his, and I killed it, I guess. I guess it was a pretty big one.” “Oh no,” I put in, “it was only a broiler. What do you think it was worth?” I took out some money, and the farmer noted the largest coin in my hand; “About half a dollar, I guess.” On this I put it all back in my pocket, and then he said, “Well, if a chicken don’t know enough to get out of the road, I guess you ain’t to blame.” I expressed that this was my own view of the case, and we drove on. When we parted I gave the half-dollar to my driver, and begged him not to let the owner of the chicken come on me for damages; and though he chuckled his pleasure in the joke, I could see that he was still unhappy, and I have no doubt that he has that pullet on his conscience yet, unless he has paid for it. He was of a race which elsewhere has so immemorially plundered hen-roosts that chickens are as free to it as the air it breathes, without any conceivable taint of private ownership. But the spirit of New England had so deeply entered into him that the imbecile broiler of another, slain by pure accident and by its own contributory negligence, was saddening only an agreeable pathos for the pullet.