Doris Lessing on broody hens

Doris Lessing's memoir, Under My Skin, contains an eloquent passage about her childhood experience with broody hens:

The best was looking after the sitting hens. I was shown how to choose only the largest eggs, assemble them in a box filled with straw in a safe place, wait until a hen fell broody. But you could induce broodiness with a ltitle spoon of sherry, while the chosen hen was tempted up to the waiting eggs. When the hen was ready, she marched into the nest, her claws settling gently among the eggs. She dipped her beak into the tin of water set in a corner of the big box. She fluffed her feathers, and was at once ready to peck at your enquiring hand. Several times a day I checked her: did she have water, did she seem content? What was time like for a hen sqatting there all day, all night, her fierce eyes on guard? Once a day she was lifted off the eggs, squawking, and encouraged to eat thrown-down grain, stretch her legs, empty great gobs of hen-dirt from her feathery backside. Meanwhile I would be sprinkling the eggs with tepid water, to make them easier for the chicks to break. She hustled back, pecking at me as she came. And so, day after day, while the eggs got heavier in the hand. When she turned the eggs, she might roll with her beak an unsatisfactory egg to the edge of the nest, and then I took it away and flung it into the bush where it imploded with the dull thud of a rotten egg. Fourteen eggs, fifteen eggs under the big Rhode Island hens, more undr a black Australorp whose downy under-caverns seem spacious enough for as many eggs as you slid in there. Sometimes there was a wild stir and cackle from the back of the house, and I went running to find one of the dogs had gone too close, or a hawk sat on a nearby tree. It was not unknown for a rat to come sneaking around in the dark, or even a snake. Once a hen was found stretched dead, the eggs cold and scattered. A snake had taken off two or three. But the dogs, who prowled all night, and the cats who seemed to know everything that went on, were a good warning system.

And then at last it was eighteen, nineteen, twenty days...I sat holding a hot egg in both my hands looking to see if there were signs of a chip, or held it to my ear. You could hear the chick turning and shifting, and then there was the minute crumbling blemish on the shell, and it became a tiny star, and the chick's beak, with its palid hardened tip, showed in the hole. And, soon, the egg fell into two halves, and out flopped the pathetic ugly wet little chick, with a look about it of lizard--the sloping head, the big helpless claws--but within a few minutes it had dried, it had achieved its status of being adorable, nestling in the outer fence of its mother's feathers, cheep, cheep, while under the hen the still unhatched chicks knocked and tumbled about in their shells. Being adorable was a condition it kept for only a day or so, for it would be stringy and lumpy for the weeks of its growing up, but then become a handsome beast, like its mother, destined for a life of egg-laying and sitting, or, if a cock, with less good prospects, for most soon ended in the pot. Even a good-sized flock of fowls nedded only a couple of cocks.

I could have used this lesson on broodiness last month before I set my Cochin on eleven fertilized eggs.  But we did hatch one chick, and I'll be better at it next time!