At this season of the year the hens are melancholy.  They want to hatch, but how can they?  They have the requisite disposition, and the capacity, and the feathers, and the nest, and everything but the eggs.  With that deficit, they sometimes sit obstinately and defy the boy’s approaches.  Many a boy has felt the sharp bill of old Dominick strike the back of his hand, inflicting a wound that would have roused up the whole farmhouse to see what was the matter had it not been that the boy wanted to excite no suspicion as to the nature of his expedition.  Immediately over the hen’s head comes the boy’s cap, and there is a scatteration of feathers all over the hay-mow, and the boy is victor.

But at last the evening before Easter comes.  While the old people are on the piazza the children come in with the accumulated treasures of many weeks, and put down the baskets.  Eggs large and small, white-shelled and brown, Cochin-Chinas and Brahmapooters.  The character of the hens is vindicated.  The cat may now lie in the sun without being kicked by false suspicions.  The surprised exclamation of parents more than compensates the boys for the strategy of long concealment.  The meanest thing in the world is for father and mother not to look surprised in such circumstances.

It sometimes happens that, in the agitation of bringing the eggs into the household harbor, the boy drops the hat or the basket, and the whole enterprise is shipwrecked.  From our own experience, it is very difficult to pick up eggs after you have once dropped them.  You have found the same experience in after life.  Your hens laid a whole nestful of golden eggs on Wall street.  You had gathered them up.  You were bringing them in.  You expected a world of congratulations, but just the day before the consummation, something adverse ran against you, and you dropped the basket, and the eggs broke.  Wise man were you if, instead of sitting down to cry or attempting to gather up the spilled yolks, you built new nests and invited a new laying.

It is sometimes found on Easter morning that the eggs have been kept too long.  The boy’s intentions were good enough, but the enterprise had been too protracted, and the casting out of the dozen was sudden and precipitate.  Indeed, that is the trouble with some older boys I wot of.  They keep their money, or their brain, or their influence hidden till it rots.  They are not willing to come forth day by day on a humble mission, doing what little good they may, but are keeping themselves hidden till some great Easter-day of triumph, and then they will astonish the Church and the world; but they find that faculties too long hidden are faculties ruined.  Better for an egg to have succeeded in making one plain cake for a poor man’s table than to have failed in making a banquet for the House of Lords.

That was a glad time when on Easter morning the eggs went into the saucepan, and came out striped, and spotted, and blue, and yellow, and the entire digestive capacity of the children was tested.  You have never had anything so good to eat since.  You found the eggs.  You hid them.  They were your contribution to the table.  Since then you have seen eggs scrambled, eggs poached, eggs in omelet, eggs boiled, eggs done on one side and eggs in a nog, but you shall never find anything like the flavor of that Easter morning in boyhood.