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Show A PAEAN TO THE HEN. The committee of ways and means has met to consider a revision of the tariff. Let them not forget the hen! The 'party is pledged to protect infant industries, and certainly raising a brood of small chicks comes into this class. It is a thankless life, that of the hen; she literally picks up a living where best she may, getting up carly enough to catch the foolish worm, which should have stayed! in bed. For luncheon she perhaps finds the luckless luck-less potato bug, which deluded itself with the thought that is was hidden from her vigilant and hungry eye; and for supper she has some half a handful, hand-ful, mayhap, of gravel to drive away the sleepless nervousness that comes from an empty stomach. Her only luxury is a dust bath in the middle of the road, whence she is aroused by dvcry passing vehicle. Not a stray dog but considers it his right to flutter flut-ter her. Yet withal, what more faithful friend of man? And what so amiable, in her work? She lays her egg, not with the sullen languor of the hired man faring to the field, but with cackle jocund and triumphant, a true song of prosperity, chanting the story of that national product which annually reaches a value greater than the com-bincd com-bincd capital of all the banks in the Union. Wc outrage her motherly longing with an incubator, and delude de-lude her maternal hopes with a doorknob. door-knob. And after this unselfish existence, ex-istence, what? She is incontinently seized by the neck and hurried to the barnyard guillotine against the day when the parson is invited to dmncr. In his lengthy grace the parson prays for the heathen in foreign lands, but never a word for the repose of the soul of the hen smoking so savorily before him. Funeral rites? Lucky is she if her head escapes the family cat. Let our tariff tinkers sec that the hen gets her rights. In the name of the American breakfast, think of what a hen union, followed by a strike, would mean! Let our statesmen at least protect her against competition H with the pauper hens of Europe, H |