He looked at Hooty and Mrs. Hooty, at their hooked bills and great claws, and decided that he would take a stout stick along with him.  He had no desire to feel these great claws.  When he had found a stick to suit him, he began to climb the tree.  Hooty and Mrs. Hooty snapped their bills and hissed fiercely.  They drew nearer.  Farmer Brown’s boy kept a watchful eye on them.  They looked so big and fierce that he was almost tempted to give up and leave them in peace.  But he just had to find out if there was anything in that nest, so he kept on.  As he drew near it, Mrs. Hooty swooped very near to him, and the snap of her bill made an ugly sound.  He held his stick ready to strike and kept on.

The nest was simply a great platform of sticks.  When Farmer Brown’s boy reached it, he found that he could not get where he could look into it, so he reached over and felt inside.  Almost at once his fingers touched something that made him tingle all over.  It was an egg, a great big egg!  There was no doubt about it.  It was just as hard for him to believe as it had been for Blacky the Crow to believe, when he first saw those eggs.  Farmer Brown’s boy’s fingers closed over that egg and took it out of the nest.  Mrs. Hooty swooped very close, and Farmer Brown’s boy nearly dropped the egg as he struck at her with his stick.  Then Mrs. Hooty and Hooty seemed to lose courage and withdrew to a tree near by, where they snapped their bills and hissed.

Then Farmer Brown’s boy looked at the prize in his hand.  It was a big, dirty-white egg.  His eyes shone.  What a splendid prize to add to his collection of birds’ eggs!  It was the first egg of the Great Horned Owl, the largest of all Owls, that he ever had seen.

Once more he felt in the nest and found there was another egg there.  “I’ll take both of them, " said he.  “It’s the first nest of Hooty’s that I’ve ever found, and perhaps I’ll never find another.  Gee, I’m glad I came over here to find out what those Crows were making such a fuss about.  I wonder if I can get these clown without breaking them.”

Just at that very minute he remembered something.  He remembered that he had stopped collecting eggs.  He remembered that he had resolved never to take another bird’s egg.

“But this is different, " whispered the tempter.  “This isn’t like taking the eggs of the little song birds.”

CHAPTER XII:  A Tree-Top Battle

   As black is black and white is white,
   So wrong is wrong and right is right.

There isn’t any half way about it.  A thing is wrong or it is right, and that is all there is to it.  But most people have hard work to see this when they want very much to do a thing that the still small voice way down inside tells them isn’t right.  They try to compromise.  To compromise is to do neither one thing nor the other but a little of both.  But you can’t do that with right and wrong.  It is a queer thing, but a half right never is as good as a whole right, while a half wrong often, very often, is as bad as a whole wrong.