when he spied two people coming down the Long Lane toward the cornfield.  He looked at them sharply, and then gave a little sigh of satisfaction.  They were Farmer Brown and Farmer Brown’s boy.  Presently they reached the cornfield and turned into it.  Then they went to work, and Blacky knew that so far as they were concerned, the way was clear for him to visit the henyard.

He didn’t fly straight there.  Oh, my, no!  Blacky is too clever to do anything like that.  He flew toward the Green Forest.  When he knew that he was out of sight of those in the cornfield, he turned and flew over to the Old Orchard, and from the top of one of the old apple-trees he studied the henyard and the barnyard and Farmer Brown’s house and the barn, to make absolutely sure that there was no danger near.  When he was quite sure, he silently flew down into the henyard as he had done many times before.  He pretended to be looking for scattered grains of corn, but all the time he was edging nearer and nearer to the open door of the henhouse.  At last he could see the box with the hay in it.  He walked right up to the open door and peered inside.  There was nothing to be afraid of that he could see.  Still he hesitated.  He did hate to go inside that door, even for a minute, and that is all it would take to fly up to that nest and get one of those eggs.

Blacky closed his eyes for just a second, and when he did that he seemed to see himself eating one of those eggs.  “What are you afraid of?” he muttered to himself as he opened his eyes.  Then with a hurried look in all directions, he flew up to the edge of the box.  There lay the two eggs!

CHAPTER XXXI:  An Egg That Wouldn’t Behave

   If you had an egg and it wouldn’t behave
    Just what would you do with that egg, may I ask? 
   To make an egg do what it don’t want to do
    Strikes me like a difficult sort of a task.

All of which is pure nonsense.  Of course.  Who ever heard of an egg either behaving or misbehaving?  Nobody.  That is, nobody that I know, unless it be Blacky.  It is best not to mention eggs in Blacky’s presence these days.  They are a forbidden topic when he is about.  Blacky is apt to be a little resentful at the mere mention of an egg.  I don’t know as I wholly blame him.  How would you feel if you knew you knew all there was to know about a thing, and then found out that you didn’t know anything at all?  Well, that is the way it is with Blacky the Crow.

If any one had told Blacky that he didn’t know all there is to know about eggs, he would have laughed at the idea.  Wasn’t he, Blacky, hatched from an egg himself?  And hadn’t he, ever since he was big enough, hunted eggs and stolen eggs and eaten eggs?  If he didn’t know about eggs, who did?  That is the way he would have talked before his visit to Farmer Brown’s henhouse.  It is since then that it has been unwise to mention eggs