Sandy Chipmunk smiled as he peered into the robin’s
nest. The four greenish-blue eggs that he saw
there looked very good to him. And he smacked
his lips—though his mother had often told
him not to. He was just picking the eggs out
of the nest when he heard a rustle in the leaves over
his head. And Sandy Chipmunk looked up quickly.
It seemed to him, at first, that the air was full
of monstrous birds. Actually, there were only
three of them—Mr. and Mrs. Robin and a
neighbor of theirs. But to Sandy they looked six
times as big as they really were. That was
because they had caught him robbing the nest.
He was so startled that he dropped the eggs.
They fell back into the nest—all except
one, which broke upon the ground beneath the tree.
“Robber!” Mrs. Robin screamed.
“Thief!” Mr. Robin roared.
“Villain!” their neighbor cried.
It is a wonder they didn’t fly straight at Sandy
and knock him off the limb.
At first he was too frightened to say a word.
But when he saw that he wasn’t hurt, Sandy looked
down at the broken egg and said:
“What a pity!” He meant it, too.
For he thought it was a shame to waste a perfectly
good egg like that, when he might have eaten it.
“You don’t mean you’re sorry, do
you?” Mrs. Robin asked him.
“Certainly I am!” Sandy told her.
“I was just counting your eggs. And when
you startled me, I dropped that one. I thought
it must be a hawk, you all made such a noise.”
“You’re sure you weren’t going to
eat our eggs?” Mr. Robin inquired.
“Eat them!” Sandy exclaimed. “Why,
my mother has often told me not to eat birds’
eggs.”
When he heard that, Mr. Robin whispered something
to his wife. And then he said to Sandy Chipmunk:
“You go home! And don’t let me catch
you around this tree again!”
Sandy was glad to escape so easily as that. And
though he was sorry to have missed a good meal, there
was one thing that made him almost happy: He
didn’t have to bother to wipe his mouth before
he let his mother see him.
BUILDING A HOUSE
There came a day when Sandy Chipmunk decided that
he was old enough and big enough to make a house of
his own. He was not the sort of person to think
and think about a thing and put off the doing of it
from one day to another. So the moment the idea
of a house popped into his head Sandy Chipmunk began
hunting for a good place to dig.
It was not long before he found a bit of ground that
seemed to him the very best spot for a home that any
one could want.
The place where he intended to make his front door
was in the middle of a smooth plot among some beech
trees. Farmer Green’s cows had clipped the
grass short all around. And Sandy knew that he
could have a neat dooryard without being obliged to
go to the trouble of cutting the grass himself.
But what he liked most of all about the place was that
as he stood there he could look all around in every
direction. That was just what he wanted, because
whenever he wished to leave his new house he would
be able to peep out and see whether anybody was waiting
to catch him.
