a phrase. Perhaps the coming American national song may have this
familiar crow for its inspiration and its burden. We might do worse,
perhaps, than to take the rooster for our national bird, even if we
reject his song as the basis of our national anthem. We took our eagle
from Rome, as France did hers; would it not have been wiser if we had
taken the cock instead, as France did after the Revolution? The Romans
and Greeks regarded the cock as a sacred bird. The principal thing
that the average school-boy remembers about Socrates is that he killed
himself immediately after ordering that a cock should be sacrificed to
Aesculapius; and some have held that the reason of his suicide was the
vociferousness of the cock, which he wanted to kill in revenge for the
misery it had caused him while he was trying to sleep or to think.

[Illustration: THE EARLY COCK]

The cock is a braver bird than the eagle. He has ever been a bold and
ready warrior, and has worn a warrior's spurs from the beginning. He
has one high soldierly quality: he knows when he is whipped; for who
has not seen him, when defeated in a gallant contest, sneak away to a
distant-corner to stand, with ruffled feathers, upon a single leg, the
very picture of humiliation and despair? And he is vigilant, for
has he not for ages revolved upon church-steeples as the emblem of
watchfulness? He has the homelier virtues. He is a kind father and a
fond as well as a multitudinous husband. He knows how to protect his
family from errant and disreputable roosters, and he is always willing
to stand aside with unsatisfied appetite and permit them to devour a
dainty he has found. He is useful and admirable in his relation to
this world, and he is not without value to the next, for popular
belief has credited him with the office of warning revisiting spirits
to retire from the earth; and when he crows all through the night, the