Old Zebediah was a chicken farmer, and he was in the fertilized egg business.
He had several hundred young layers, called pullets, and eight or ten roosters, whose job was to fertilize the eggs.
Zebediah kept records, and any rooster that didn’t perform well went into the soup pot and was replaced.
Naturally, watching them all took an awful lot of Zebediah’s time. So he got a set of tiny, bells and attached them to his roosters. Each bell had a different tone so that he could tell, from a distance, which rooster was performing.
Now he could sit on the porch and fill out an efficiency report, simply by listening to the bells.
Zebediah’s favorite rooster was old Brewster. A very fine specimen he was, too. But on this particular morning, Zebediah noticed that Brewster’s bell had not rung at all!
He went to investigate what was happening.
The other roosters were chasing pullets, and the bells were ringing! The pullets, hearing the roosters coming, would run for cover.
But to Zebediah’s amazement, Brewster had his bell in his beak, so it couldn’t ring. He would sneak up on a pullet, do his job and walk on to the next one.
Zebediah was so proud of Brewster, that he entered him in the county fair, where Brewster became an overnight sensation.
The judges not only awarded him the No Bell Piece Prize but also the Pulletsurprise.
Image used under a Collective Commons License from: https://www.pexels.com/photo/animal-agriculture-farm-chicken-4196/
