My brother and I used to say this to the disgust/amusement of most adults present. I b'lieve we learned it off a Steve Allen or Johnny Carson show. Somebody's monologue, anyway, and as I recall, and the point was to find a sucker who would repeat the whole thing back to you, starting with the one hen, and then repeating each additional line. It went:
One hen,
Two ducks
Three squawking geese
Four Limerick oysters
Five corpulent porpoises
Six pairs of Dr. Visser's tweezers
Seven thousand Macedonians in full battle array
Eight (something) octapi (something)
Nine sympathetic apathetic diabetic old men, each with a marked propensity for procrastination and sloth.

It went on from there, but this was the place where practically everyone wiped out, and I forget the rest.
Probably Joe Offer has looked this up and found it somewhere by now, but I'll ship it anyway.
Blessings,
Barbara