June 4 Saturday – Sam’s article, “More Distinction,” a hilarious guide to raising chickens, ran in the Buffalo Express:

In the case of the other method mentioned for raising poultry, your friend takes along a covered vessel with a charcoal fire in it, and you carry a long slender plank. This is a frosty night, understand. Arrived at the tree or fence or other hen-roost, (your own, if you are an idiot,) you warm the end of your plank in your friend’s fire vessel and then raise it aloft and ease it up gently against a slumbering chicken’s feet. If the subject of your attentions is a true bird, he will infallibly return thanks with a sleepy cluck or two and step out and take up quarters on the plank, thus becoming so conspicuously accessory before the fact to his own murder as to make it a grave question in our minds, as it once was in the mind of Blackstone, whether he is not really and deliberately committing suicide in the second degree [McCullough 209].