“Oh, don’t mind us,” Minver responded to his general appeal.  “We may not understand the feelings of a father, but we are all mothers at heart, especially Rulledge.  Go on.  It’s very exciting,” he urged, not very ironically, and Newton went on.

“Well, I don’t believe I could say just how the havoc began.  They put away their eggs very carefully after they had made their mother admire them, and shown the baby how hers were the prettiest, and they each said in succession that they must be very precious of them, for if you shook an egg, or anything, it wouldn’t hatch; and it was their plan to take these home and set an unemployed pullet, belonging to the big brother, to hatching them in the coop that he had built of laths for her in the back yard with his own hands.  But long before the afternoon was over, the evil one had entered Eden, and tempted the boy to try fighting eggs with these treasured specimens, as I had told we boys used to fight eggs in my town in the southwest.  He held a conquering course through the encounter with three eggs, but met his Waterloo with a regular Bluecher belonging to the baby.  Then he instantly changed sides; and smashed his Bluecher against the last egg left.  By that time all the other children were in tears, the baby roaring powerfully in ignorant sympathy, and the victor steeped in silent gloom.  His mother made him gather up the ruins from the floor, and put them in the stove, and she took possession of the victorious egg, and said she would keep it till we got back to Cambridge herself, and not let one of them touch it.  I can tell you it was a tragical time.  I wanted to go out and buy them another set of eggs, and spring them for a surprise on them in the morning, after they had suffered enough that night.  But she said that if I dared to dream of such a thing—­which would be the ruin of the children’s character, by taking away the consequences of their folly—­she should do, she did not know what, to me.  Of course she was right, and I gave in, and helped the children forget all about it, so that by the time we got back to Cambridge I had forgotten about it myself.

“I don’t know what it was reminded the boy of that remaining Easter egg unless it was the sight of the unemployed pullet in her coop, which he visited the first thing; and I don’t know how he managed to wheedle his mother out of it; but the first night after I came home from business—­it was rather late and the children had gone to bed—­she told me that ridiculous boy, as she called him in self-exculpation, had actually put the egg under his pullet, and all the children were wild to see what it would hatch.  ‘And now,’ she said, severely, ’what are you going to do?  You have filled their heads with those ideas, and I suppose you will have to invent some nonsense or other to fool them, and make them believe that it has hatched a giraffe, or an elephant, or something; they won’t be satisfied with anything less.’  I said we should have to try something smaller, for I didn’t think we could manage a chick of that size on our lot; and that I should trust in Providence.  Then she said it was all very well to laugh; and that I couldn’t get out of it that way, and I needn’t think it.