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Recovered from Salt Lake City Telegraph, March 8, 1866, p. 4.]
Chickens
The man who lives next door to me on the right keeps chickens; and the man
who lives next door to me on the left keeps chickens; and the fiend who
lives across the alley in the rear keeps chickens, and so do all the deep-dyed
villains on either side of me keep chickens -- and the roosters crow the whole
night long, and the hens lay an egg apiece it at sunrise and then cackle about
it the whole day long. I have been praying for three hours, now, and if my prayers
are answered, every man in this ranch of San Francisco who owns a chicken will
be sunk so deep into the hottest sink of perdition before sunset that a telegraph
message sent to him from the surface of hell would require nine-tenths of eternity
to reach him. Amen.
[Reprinted in American Literary Realism, Vol. 47, No. 1, Fall 2014, p. 93.]
