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Frost's Fancy Chickens
A Just Judge, page 89
...From the time they hung the blue ribbon on her coop, she always had an audience to the end of the show. She was well trained and took it all as a matter of course. She showed herself front, three-quarters, profile, back, almost as regularly as a revolving show case. But she listened to the praise on every hand with composure, the more so as much of it would have made her of another breed entirely….
A Start in the Fancy, page 147
The pullet's every egg was saved for incubation. Chickens came and for awhile they looked their prize blood. Then for awhile they didn't....At this point the man's courage was at the lowest ebb.
But if he had given up he would have lived to regret it. For it was not two years after that the same neighbors who had come out of their way to make sport of the first up-to-date poultryman in their midst were turning up-to-date poultrymen themselves. Excitement over the new poultryculture stuck the town with a rush. Everyone talked hens and built paper covered houses. There was talk of a local show....
Old Welch Goes to the Show, page 334
Old Welch did not care about having his neighbors in when he was getting ready for the show, because, as he said, 'The laity don't understand, and can't be expected to.'
Still, he did not admit there was anything to conceal. He used to say, 'I guess 'tis fair enough to groom and tame the birds a little before showing.' He scorned the defence that if he was bad others were worse. Other might be worse, he was not bad. He was an honest man….
The Question of a Feather, Page 301
'[W]e have not shown yet but if we are prospered in our stock this year, we intended to go to Boston in the winter, and perhaps New York, and that reminds me--Martha, that feather; you are just in time Mr. Fulton, to help us with that feather on the leg of, I think, our best pullet.'"
'Pull it?'
'Yes, pullet.'
'Help you pull it, I mean.'
'Tell us whether it is right to pull it,' she answered, flushed and serious.
His call to see the hens had degenerated into a call on sister Martha, which was more than he bargained for, and now he found himself confronted with a very nice question of ethics that up to this time he had always managed to avoid. The question of pulling feathers was one to which he had always thrown his columns open for discussion..."
Dalkins' Little Indulgence -- A Christmas Story, Page 1
It is no matter how much Dalkins paid for the bird; the point is that the man who sold it to him somehow got the impression that he did not pay enough--that he would have paid more. He could not have denied that Dalkins paid him all he asked. So that he had himself to blame if it was not enough. But he got to talking as if he had been cheated--and badly cheated. He enlarged upon the bird until he said he shouldn't wonder if Dalkins would get a cool fifty for it. He groomed it, so to speak, as he thought of it. He made it a little whiter than white, a little more symmetrical than symmetry.
As a matter of fact it was the kind of bird that is worth what one can get for it. It transcended scoring, as it was better than any score reputable judges are willing to sign. It was a bird framed by nature for comparison judging....