A highly respectable hen was cleaning herself with her beak one day, when she broke off one of her feathers. 'Not another one,' she sighed. 'I ll never be beautiful at this rate.'
Her neighbour, overhearing, misunderstood the hen's words and went and told the mother hen, 'One of my sisters is pulling out all her feathers to make herself more beautiful...'
Listening on the roof of the hen house, the owl remarked, 'What a shameless creature.'
'Be quite,' warned his wife,. 'Don't let the children hear you.'
But she flew off nonetheless to tell the pigeons. 'Have you heard? One of the hens has plucked out all her feathers for love of the cockerel. She'll catch a cold, if she isn't already dead!'
In the pigeons' retelling of the story the number of featherless hens had risen to two. From the swallows to the bats, the story grew more and more amazing. When finally it got back to the hen house, would you believe it, at least five or six hens were without feathers after a jealous fight over the cockerel!
Obviously the first respectable hen had no idea that she was a participant in a story of this kind.
'What a scandal,' she exclaimed. 'They should be ashamed of themselves!'
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