CHAPTER XXXII:  What Blacky Did With The Stolen Egg

Blacky was puzzled.  He didn’t know what to make of that egg he had stolen from Farmer Brown’s henhouse.  It wasn’t like any egg he ever had seen or even heard of.  It was a beautiful-looking egg, and he had been sure that it would taste as good, quite as good as it looked.  Even now he wasn’t sure that if he could only taste it, it would be all that he had hoped.  But how could he taste it, when he couldn’t break that shell?  He never had heard of such a shell.  He doubted if anybody else ever had, either.  He had hammered at it with his stout bill until he was afraid that he would break that, instead of the egg.  The more he tried to break into it and couldn’t, the hungrier he grew, and the more certain that nothing else in all the world could possibly taste so good.  But the Old Orchard was not the place for him to work on that egg.  In the first place, it was too near Farmer Brown’s house.  This made Blacky uneasy.  You see, he had something of a guilty conscience.  Not that he felt at all a sense of having done wrong.  To his way of thinking, if he were smart enough to get that egg, he had just as much right to it as any one else, particularly Farmer Brown’s boy.  Yet he wasn’t at all sure that Farmer Brown’s boy would look at the matter quite that way.  In fact, he had a feeling that Farmer Brown’s boy would call him a thief if he should be discovered with that egg.  Then, too, there were too many sharp eyes in the Old Orchard.  He wanted to get away where he could be sure of being alone.  Then if he couldn’t break that shell, no one would be the wiser.  So he picked up the egg and flew straight over to the Green Forest, and this time he managed to get there without dropping it.

Now you would never suspect Blacky the Crow, he of the sharp wits and crafty ways, of being amused by bright things, would you?  But he is.  In fact, Blacky is quite like a little child in this matter.  Anything that is bright and shiny interests Blacky right away.  If he finds anything of this kind, he will take it away to a certain secret place, and there he will admire it and play with it and finally hide it.  If I didn’t know that it isn’t so, because it couldn’t possibly be so, I should think that Blacky was some relation to certain small boys I know.  Always their pockets are filled with all sorts of useless odds and ends which they have picked up here and there.  Blacky has no pockets, so he keeps his treasures of this kind in a secret hiding-place, a sort of treasure storehouse.  He visits this secretly every day, uncovers his treasures, and gloats over them and plays with them, then carefully covers them up again.  First Blacky took this egg over near his home, and there he once more tried and tried and tried to break the shell.  But the shell wouldn’t break, not even when Blacky quite lost his temper and hammered at it for all he