CHAPTER XXXII: What Blacky Did With The Stolen Egg
Blacky was puzzled. He didn’t know what
to make of that egg he had stolen from Farmer Brown’s
henhouse. It wasn’t like any egg he ever
had seen or even heard of. It was a beautiful-looking
egg, and he had been sure that it would taste as good,
quite as good as it looked. Even now he wasn’t
sure that if he could only taste it, it would be all
that he had hoped. But how could he taste it,
when he couldn’t break that shell? He
never had heard of such a shell. He doubted
if anybody else ever had, either. He had hammered
at it with his stout bill until he was afraid that
he would break that, instead of the egg. The
more he tried to break into it and couldn’t,
the hungrier he grew, and the more certain that nothing
else in all the world could possibly taste so good.
But the Old Orchard was not the place for him to
work on that egg. In the first place, it was
too near Farmer Brown’s house. This made
Blacky uneasy. You see, he had something of
a guilty conscience. Not that he felt at all
a sense of having done wrong. To his way of
thinking, if he were smart enough to get that egg,
he had just as much right to it as any one else, particularly
Farmer Brown’s boy. Yet he wasn’t
at all sure that Farmer Brown’s boy would look
at the matter quite that way. In fact, he had
a feeling that Farmer Brown’s boy would call
him a thief if he should be discovered with that egg.
Then, too, there were too many sharp eyes in the
Old Orchard. He wanted to get away where he
could be sure of being alone. Then if he couldn’t
break that shell, no one would be the wiser.
So he picked up the egg and flew straight over to
the Green Forest, and this time he managed to get there
without dropping it.
Now you would never suspect Blacky the Crow, he of
the sharp wits and crafty ways, of being amused by
bright things, would you? But he is. In
fact, Blacky is quite like a little child in this
matter. Anything that is bright and shiny interests
Blacky right away. If he finds anything of this
kind, he will take it away to a certain secret place,
and there he will admire it and play with it and finally
hide it. If I didn’t know that it isn’t
so, because it couldn’t possibly be so, I should
think that Blacky was some relation to certain small
boys I know. Always their pockets are filled
with all sorts of useless odds and ends which they
have picked up here and there. Blacky has no
pockets, so he keeps his treasures of this kind in
a secret hiding-place, a sort of treasure storehouse.
He visits this secretly every day, uncovers his treasures,
and gloats over them and plays with them, then carefully
covers them up again. First Blacky took this
egg over near his home, and there he once more tried
and tried and tried to break the shell. But
the shell wouldn’t break, not even when Blacky
quite lost his temper and hammered at it for all he
