He looked at Hooty and Mrs. Hooty, at their hooked
bills and great claws, and decided that he would take
a stout stick along with him. He had no desire
to feel these great claws. When he had found
a stick to suit him, he began to climb the tree.
Hooty and Mrs. Hooty snapped their bills and hissed
fiercely. They drew nearer. Farmer Brown’s
boy kept a watchful eye on them. They looked
so big and fierce that he was almost tempted to give
up and leave them in peace. But he just had
to find out if there was anything in that nest, so
he kept on. As he drew near it, Mrs. Hooty swooped
very near to him, and the snap of her bill made an
ugly sound. He held his stick ready to strike
and kept on.
The nest was simply a great platform of sticks.
When Farmer Brown’s boy reached it, he found
that he could not get where he could look into it,
so he reached over and felt inside. Almost at
once his fingers touched something that made him tingle
all over. It was an egg, a great big egg!
There was no doubt about it. It was just as
hard for him to believe as it had been for Blacky the
Crow to believe, when he first saw those eggs.
Farmer Brown’s boy’s fingers closed over
that egg and took it out of the nest. Mrs. Hooty
swooped very close, and Farmer Brown’s boy nearly
dropped the egg as he struck at her with his stick.
Then Mrs. Hooty and Hooty seemed to lose courage
and withdrew to a tree near by, where they snapped
their bills and hissed.
Then Farmer Brown’s boy looked at the prize
in his hand. It was a big, dirty-white egg.
His eyes shone. What a splendid prize to add
to his collection of birds’ eggs! It was
the first egg of the Great Horned Owl, the largest
of all Owls, that he ever had seen.
Once more he felt in the nest and found there was
another egg there. “I’ll take both
of them, " said he. “It’s the first
nest of Hooty’s that I’ve ever found,
and perhaps I’ll never find another. Gee,
I’m glad I came over here to find out what those
Crows were making such a fuss about. I wonder
if I can get these clown without breaking them.”
Just at that very minute he remembered something.
He remembered that he had stopped collecting eggs.
He remembered that he had resolved never to take
another bird’s egg.
“But this is different, " whispered the tempter.
“This isn’t like taking the eggs of the
little song birds.”
CHAPTER XII: A Tree-Top Battle
As black is black and white is white,
So wrong is wrong and right is right.
There isn’t any half way about it. A thing
is wrong or it is right, and that is all there is
to it. But most people have hard work to see
this when they want very much to do a thing that the
still small voice way down inside tells them isn’t
right. They try to compromise. To compromise
is to do neither one thing nor the other but a little
of both. But you can’t do that with right
and wrong. It is a queer thing, but a half right
never is as good as a whole right, while a half wrong
often, very often, is as bad as a whole wrong.
