when he spied two people coming down the Long Lane
toward the cornfield. He looked at them sharply,
and then gave a little sigh of satisfaction.
They were Farmer Brown and Farmer Brown’s boy.
Presently they reached the cornfield and turned into
it. Then they went to work, and Blacky knew
that so far as they were concerned, the way was clear
for him to visit the henyard.
He didn’t fly straight there. Oh, my,
no! Blacky is too clever to do anything like
that. He flew toward the Green Forest.
When he knew that he was out of sight of those in
the cornfield, he turned and flew over to the Old
Orchard, and from the top of one of the old apple-trees
he studied the henyard and the barnyard and Farmer
Brown’s house and the barn, to make absolutely
sure that there was no danger near. When he
was quite sure, he silently flew down into the henyard
as he had done many times before. He pretended
to be looking for scattered grains of corn, but all
the time he was edging nearer and nearer to the open
door of the henhouse. At last he could see the
box with the hay in it. He walked right up to
the open door and peered inside. There was nothing
to be afraid of that he could see. Still he
hesitated. He did hate to go inside that door,
even for a minute, and that is all it would take to
fly up to that nest and get one of those eggs.
Blacky closed his eyes for just a second, and when
he did that he seemed to see himself eating one of
those eggs. “What are you afraid of?”
he muttered to himself as he opened his eyes.
Then with a hurried look in all directions, he flew
up to the edge of the box. There lay the two
eggs!
CHAPTER XXXI: An Egg That Wouldn’t Behave
If you had an egg and it wouldn’t
behave
Just what would you do with
that egg, may I ask?
To make an egg do what it don’t
want to do
Strikes me like a difficult
sort of a task.
All of which is pure nonsense. Of course.
Who ever heard of an egg either behaving or misbehaving?
Nobody. That is, nobody that I know, unless
it be Blacky. It is best not to mention eggs
in Blacky’s presence these days. They
are a forbidden topic when he is about. Blacky
is apt to be a little resentful at the mere mention
of an egg. I don’t know as I wholly blame
him. How would you feel if you knew you knew
all there was to know about a thing, and then found
out that you didn’t know anything at all?
Well, that is the way it is with Blacky the Crow.
If any one had told Blacky that he didn’t know
all there is to know about eggs, he would have laughed
at the idea. Wasn’t he, Blacky, hatched
from an egg himself? And hadn’t he, ever
since he was big enough, hunted eggs and stolen eggs
and eaten eggs? If he didn’t know about
eggs, who did? That is the way he would have
talked before his visit to Farmer Brown’s henhouse.
It is since then that it has been unwise to mention
eggs
