From The Culprit Fay by Joseph Rodman Drake, 1903.

The symbolism here is rather blatant — the rooster is the male principle who engendered a newborn spool of cotton thread.  As someone once said, "Wool makes yarn; flax makes linen; cotton makes cotton."  From c. 1890.

Here's where postcards come from.

This is really something: the Hamilton Public Library has categorized as non-fiction our book of imaginary Kafka parables, Franzlations.  As library patron Selway noted, "What higher commendation for a book of parables could there be?"  This qualifies as a Retroactive Lifetime Goal (phrase used courtesy of literary humorist Jonathan Caws-Elwitt). Here's a page from Franzlations, which symbolically shows that chickens' eggs are oblong in accordance with the earth's elliptical orbit around the sun.  Chickens are famously linked to the sun, as the rooster announces each dawn.

"Ask Henda.  'She knows the answers'" to these questions: "Will I be lucky in love?"  "Will I have financial trouble this year?"  "Is this my lucky day?"  "Am I putting on too much weight?"  "Will it rain today?"  "Will my health improve?"  From the State Fair of Texas, 1984, photographed by Lynn Lennon.

From The Dream Adventures of Little Bill by Edmund Goldsborough, 1910.

Carrier pigeons get all the glory as postal carriers, but we learn here that "chicken mail" required a self-addressed, stamped envelope.  From St. Nicholas magazine, 1900.

Forget the chicken -- which came first, the dove or the egg?  From The Peace Egg, a Mumming Play, 1835.

Doctor Dolittle notwithstanding:

"So perhaps the answer is simply to collect all the facts, and then make a judgement. But is it possible to collect all the facts? You cannot, after all, talk to the chickens." —For Business Ethics (2005)

"When I was a little girl I thought chickens were the souls of dead actresses."
—Leonora Carrington, The Stone Door