As Uncle Andy paused again at this point the Babe, who was always polite, felt that he was really expected to ask a question here. If he did not, it might look as if he were not taking an interest. He would rather ask too many questions than run the risk of seeming inappreciative.

"_Why_ were there only two young ones in the nest in the pine tree?" he inquired.

It was very hard to know sometimes just what would please Uncle Andy, and what wouldn't. But this time it was quite all right.

"Now, that's a proper, sensible question," said he. "I was just coming to that. You see, there ought to have been four youngsters in that nest, too, for there had been four greeny-blue, brown-spotted eggs to start with. But even crows have their troubles. And the pair that owned this particular nest were a somewhat original and erratic couple.

When the mother had laid her last egg and was getting ready to sit, she decided to take an airing before settling down to work. Though her mate was not at hand to guard the nest, she flew off down to the farm to see if there was anything new going on among those foolish men, or perhaps to catch a mouse among the cornstalks."

"Do _crows_ eat _mice_?" demanded the Babe in astonishment.

"Of course they do," answered Uncle Andy impatiently. "Everybody that eats meat at all eats mice, except us human beings. And in some parts of the world we, too, eat them, dipped in honey."

"Oh--h--h!" shuddered the Babe.

"Well, as I was going to say when you interrupted me, no sooner was she well out of the way than a red squirrel, who had been watching from the nearest fir tree, saw his chance. It was a rare one. n.o.body liked eggs better than he did, or got fewer of them. Like a flash he was over from the fir branches into the pine ones, and up and into the nest.

"His sharp teeth went into the nearest egg, and he drank its contents greedily--and cleverly, let me tell you, for it's not so easy to manage without getting it all over your fur. He was just going to begin on another when there was a sharp hiss of wings just above him and a loud _ca-ah_ of alarm. The father bird was back and swooping down upon him.

He threw himself clear of the nest, fell to a lower branch, and raced out to its tip to spring into his fir tree. At this moment the furious father struck him, knocking him clean off into the air.

"The air was now full of black wings and angry cries, as the crows from neighboring nests flocked to the help of their fellow citizen. But the little red robber was brave and kept his head. Spreading his legs wide and flat, he made a sort of parachute of himself, and, instead of falling like a stone, he glided down to another branch. Those beating wings and terrible jabbing beaks were all about him, but they got in each other's way. And he was a wonder at dodging, I can tell you, now that he was among the bigger branches, and, though he got several nasty thrusts, which covered his fine coat with blood, he gained his hole, halfway down the tree, and whisked into it safely.

"Into this narrow retreat, of course, none of the crows dared to follow him, knowing that they would there be at the mercy of his teeth. But they gathered in fierce excitement about the entrance, scolding the audacious thief at the top of their voices, and threatening him with every kind of vengeance when he should dare to come out. And from time to time one or another of the boldest would alight on the very edge of the hole, c.o.c.k his head, and peer in, to bounce away again instantly with a startled squawk as the squirrel would jump up at him, chattering with rage.

"In the midst of all this excitement the careless mother came hurrying back. She had heard the row, of course. One could hear it all over the parish. Un.o.bserved, she flew straight to the nest. Her big, dark, cunning eyes blazed for an instant, but she knew it was all her fault, and she thought it best to make no fuss. Hastily she dropped the empty sh.e.l.l over the side of the nest, and then took her place dutifully on the three remaining eggs. In a few minutes the rest of the crows got tired of scolding the squirrel in his hole and came _ca_-ing back to the pine tree to talk the matter over. When her mate, all in a fume, hopped onto the edge of the nest, the mother looked up at him with eyes of cold inquiry, as much as to say: 'Well, I'd like to know what all this fuss is about. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, acting that way about a wretched squirrel!' Of course, she may not have said all that. But she certainly gave all the other crows the impression that there was nothing wrong about _her_ nest, and that they had better go and look after their own. Thereupon they all said sarcastic things to their fellow citizen and left him indignantly. He, poor fellow, found it impossible to explain or justify himself, because his mate was sitting on the eggs; so he flew off in a huff to try and find a sparrow's nest to rob. When he came back he had taken pains to forget just how many eggs there had ever been in the nest.

"Oh, yes, I know there were still three. Well, three or four days later a boy came up from the farmhouse and climbed the pine tree, He was not the kind of a boy that robs birds' nests, but he was making a collection. He wanted just one crow's egg, and he had a theory that birds cannot count. He liked crows--in fact, on that farm no one was ever allowed to shoot crows or any other birds except the murderous duck hawk, and he felt that the crows owed him _one_ egg, anyhow, in return for the protection they enjoyed on his father's property.

"Now, you must not think he chose the pine tree because it was the easiest to climb," went on Uncle Andy hurriedly, seeing in the Babe's eyes that this point had to be cleared up at once. "In fact, it was the _hardest_ to climb. Any one of the fir trees would have been easier, and they all had crows' nests in them. But the boy knew that he could not climb any of them without getting his clothes all over balsam, which would mean a lot of inconvenient explanations with his mother. So he went up the pine tree, of course, and spared his mother's feelings.

"The crows displayed no sense of grat.i.tude whatever. He might have eggs, of course, that boy, but not _their_ eggs! They flapped around him savagely, and made so much noise in his ears that he could not hear himself think. But he kept his big straw hat pulled down well over his eyes, and paid no attention whatever to the indignant birds. And because he was so quiet and positive about it, not one of them _quite_ dared to actually touch him. The mother bird hopped off the nest sullenly just as he was about to put his hand on her. He took one egg, put it in his pocket, examined the nest with interest, and climbed down again. Just as he was nearing the ground he broke the egg. This, of course, made him feel not only sticky but somewhat embarra.s.sed. He saw that he might have some difficulty in explaining that pocket to his mother. Even a great deal of balsam would have been better than _that_ egg. But he comforted himself with the thought that he would never have been able to blow it, anyhow, on account of its being so advanced.

"And that's why there were only two young crows in that particular nest.

"But they were an altogether unusual pair, these two. In the first place, receiving all the food and all the attention that were usually divided among four or five, they had grown and feathered extraordinarily fast, till now they were ready for flight, while their fellows in the neighboring nests were still ragged and 'quilly'

looking. In the second place, they had inherited from their eccentric parents an altogether surprising amount of originality. Their feathers were beautifully firm and black and glossy, their beaks sharp and polished; and in their full, dark, intelligent eyes there was an impishness that even a crow might regard as especially impish."

"What's _impish_?" demanded the Babe.

"Goodness me! Don't you know what _impish_ is?" exclaimed Uncle Andy.

He thought a moment, and then, finding it a little difficult to explain, he added with convenient severity:

"If you will listen, you'll find out, perhaps."

"Well, the two grew so fast that, before their parents realized at all what precocious youngsters they were, they had climbed out upon the edge of the nest and begun to stretch their fine wings. With hoa.r.s.e expostulations their father tried to persuade them back. But their mother, who was not so conservative, chuckled her approval and flew off to hunt young mice for them. Thus encouraged, they ignored their father's prudent counsels, and hopped out, with elated squawks, upon the branch. Whereupon the father, somewhat huffed, flew up to the very topmost branch of the tree and perched there, swaying in the breeze, and trying to forget his family cares. From this high post of observation he presently caught sight of an eagle, winging his way up from the swamp at the lower end of the valley. With a sharp signal cry for volunteers, he dashed off in pursuit. He was joined by two other crows who happened to be at leisure; and the three, quickly overtaking the majestic voyager, began to load him with impertinence and abuse.

With their comparatively short but very broad wings the crows could dodge so nimbly in the air that if was quite impossible for their great enemy to catch them. He made no attempt to do so. Indignantly he changed the direction of his flight, and began to soar, climbing gradually into the blue in splendid, sweeping circles; while the crows, croaking mockery and triumph, kept flapping above him and below, darting at his eyes, and dashing with open beaks at the shining whiteness of his crown. They dared not come near enough to actually touch him, but they succeeded in making themselves most unpleasant.

The eagle glared at them steadily with his fierce, black-and-yellow eyes, but otherwise seemed to pay them no attention whatever. Only he kept mounting higher and higher, till at last his impish tormentors--_impish_, I said--dared follow him no farther. They came fluttering down hurriedly to more congenial levels, and flew back to the grove to boast of their 'great victory.'"

"My, but that eagle must have felt awfully ashamed!" exclaimed the Babe.

"The _next_ day," continued Uncle Andy, without noticing the interruption, "the two old crows began to think it would soon be time to teach this independent pair of youngsters to fly. And they thought, too, that they'd be able to manage it all by themselves, without any help or advice from the rest of the flock. While they were thinking about it, in the next tree, for they were not a great pair to stay at home, you know, one of the youngsters, the female, gave an impatient squawk, spread her wings, and fell off her branch. She thought it was flying, you know, but at first she just fell, flapping her wings wildly. In two seconds, however, she seemed to get the hang of it, more or less. With a violent effort, she rose, gained the next tree, alighted, panting, beside her parents and looked at them with a superior air, as if she thought that they could never have accomplished such a thing at her age. That was perhaps true, of course, but it was not for her to think so."

"Huh! I should think not, indeed!" agreed the Babe severely.

"Well," continued Uncle Andy, now quite absorbed in his narrative, "the other youngster, not to be outdone, went hopping up in great excitement from branch to branch, till he was some ten feet above the rest of the family. Then, launching himself boldly, he went fluttering down to them with no difficulty at all. He was less impetuous and more sagacious than his sister.

"After this the parents continued to feed their independent offspring for a number of days, just because they had been accustomed to feed their nestling for a certain length of time, till at last the youngsters started off to forage on their own account, and the family, as a family, broke up. From habit, however, or from good will, the youngsters kept coming back to roost on the branches beside the nest, and remained on the most friendly, though easy-going, relations with their father and mother.

"In every crow flock, large or small, there seems to be some kind of discipline, some kind of obedience to the wise old leaders of the flock. But the two black imps of Pine-Top were apparently, for the time at least, exempted from it. They did about as they liked and were a nuisance to everybody but their two selves, whom they admired immensely. Being too young for the old crows to take seriously, their pranks were tolerated, or they would soon have been pecked and beaten into better manners. Too big and too grown-up for the young crows--whom they visited in their nests and tormented till driven away by the indignant parents--they had no a.s.sociates but each other. So they followed their own whims; and the flock was philosophically indifferent as to what might happen to them.

"You must not think, however, that they did not learn anything, these two. They were sharp. They listened to what was being said around them, and the crows, you know, are the greatest talkers ever; so they soon knew the difference between a man with a gun and a man without one. They knew that an owl in the daytime is not the same thing as an owl at night. They gathered that a scarecrow is not as dangerous as it looks. And many other things that a crow needs to know and believe they condescended to learn, because learning came easy to them. But common caution they did not learn, because it did not seem to them either interesting or necessary. So it was often just luck that got them out of sc.r.a.pes, though they always thought it was their own cleverness.

"It was just lucky, of course, that day when they went exploring in the patch of dark woods down in the valley, that the big brown owl did not get one or the other of them. He was asleep on a big dead branch as brown as himself, and looking so like a part of it that they were just going to alight, either upon him or within reach of his deadly clutch, when a red squirrel saw them and shrieked at them. Two great, round, glaring orange eyes opened upon them from that brown p.r.o.ng of the branch, so suddenly that they gave two startled squawks and nearly fell to the ground. How the red squirrel t.i.ttered, hating both the owl and the crows. But the imps, when they got over their start, were furious.

Flying over the owl's head, they kept screaming at the top of their voices something which probably meant 'an owl! an owl! an owl!'; and immediately every other crow within hearing took up the cry, till in two minutes half the flock were gathered in the patch of woods. They swarmed screaming about the owl's head, striking at him with their sharp beaks and strong black wings, but always too wary to come quite within his reach. The great night prowler knew that in the daylight he could not catch them--that, indeed, if he did succeed in catching one in his claws the others would throw caution to the winds and all be down upon him at once. He sat there, straight and stiff, for a while, snapping his terrible beak and hissing at them like an angry cat. Till at last, realizing that there was no more chance of a peaceful sleep for him there, he spread his huge, downy wings and sailed off smoothly to seek some more secluded neighborhood. The whole flock pursued him, with their tormenting and abuse, for perhaps a couple of miles; and then, at some signal from their leaders, dropped the chase suddenly and turned their attention to what looked like a sort of game of tag, in a wide, open pasture where no enemy could steal upon them unawares. The imps felt themselves great heroes, but if it had not been for that red squirrel, the owl, sleepy though he was, would certainly have got one of them."

The Babe wanted to ask whether the squirrel had warned them out of friendliness or just out of dislike to the owl, but before he could frame his question quite satisfactorily, or get out anything more than a hasty "But why--?" Uncle Andy had gone on with an emphasis which discouraged interruption.

"It was lucky for them, too, that no guns were fired on the big farm below the grove--the crows were there believed to earn the corn they stole by the grubs and cutworms and mice they killed. That was _very_ lucky for the two imps, for they were forever hanging about the farmyard and the big locust trees that ran along the foot of the garden. The farmer himself and his hired hands paid no attention to them, but the boy, the one who had prevented there being three imps instead of two, he was tremendously interested. At first they were shy of him, because, perhaps, they felt him watching them out of the corners of his keen blue eyes. But at last they decided he was no more dangerous than the rest, and made sarcastic remarks about him in a language which he couldn't understand.

"There was always food to be picked up around the farmyard when the men were absent in the fields, the womenfolk busy in the kitchen, and the boy somewhere out of sight. And it was food doubly sweet because it had to be stolen from the fussy hens or the ridiculous ducks or the stupid, complacent pigeons. Then there was always something interesting to be done. It was fun to bully the pigeons and to give sly, savage jabs to the half-grown chicks. It was delightful to steal the bright tops of tin tomato cans--they _thought_ they were stealing them, of course, because they could not imagine such fascinating things being thrown away, even by those fool men--to s.n.a.t.c.h them hurriedly, fly off with them to the tall green pine-top, and hide them in their old nest till they got it looking quite like a rubbish dump, and good pasture for a goat. And most of all, perhaps, was it fun to tease the lazy old kitchen cat, till her tail would get as big as a bottle brush with helpless indignation."

"The _cat_?" exclaimed the Babe. "Why, weren't they afraid of _her_?"

"Wait and see!" remarked Uncle Andy simply, with no apologies whatever to the Prime Minister. "Well, as I was about to say, their method was simple and effective. They would wait till they found the cat lying along the narrow top of the rail fence, sunning herself. It was her favorite place, though it can hardly have been comfortable, it was so narrow. The He imp would alight on the rail, about ten feet in front of her, and pretend to be very sick, squawking feebly and drooping his black wings with a struggling flutter, as if it was all he could do to keep his perch. The cat, her narrow eyes opening very wide, would start to creep up to him. The She imp would then alight on the rail behind her and nip her sharply by the tail, and go hopping clumsily off down the rail. The cat would wheel with an angry _pfiff-ff_, and start after this new quarry. Whereupon the He imp would again nip her tail.

This would be repeated several times before the cat would realize that she was being made a fool of. Then she would bounce down from the fence and race off to the kitchen in a towering rage, and the impudent youngsters would fly up into the nearest tree top and _ca_ about it delightedly.

"Then there was the scarecrow, in the middle of the big strawberry patch down at the foot of the huge garden. It did not scare these two young rascals, not in the least. It was an excellently made scarecrow, and did strike terror to the heart of many of the smaller birds. But its hat was packed with straw, and the imps found it was a pleasant game pulling the straws out through a couple of holes in the crown, and strewing them over the strawberry bed. Incidentally, they liked strawberries, and ate a good many of them as sauce to their ordinary diet of grubs and mice and chicken feed. And it was this weakness of theirs for strawberries that led to their misunderstanding with the Boy, and then with the big rat that lived under the tool shed.

"That strawberry patch was one of the things that the Boy took a particular interest in. When he saw that the imps also took such an interest in it, eating the berries instead of the grubs, he began to get annoyed. From his window, which overlooked the garden, he had seen what liberties the imps took with the scarecrow, so he realized there was no help for him in scarecrows. But _something_ must be done, that he vowed, and done at once, or his strawberries were going to be mighty scarce. He didn't want to do any real harm to even such a troublesome pair of birds as the imps, but he was determined to give them a lesson that might teach them some respect, not only for strawberry patches, but even for scarecrows.

"On the crown of the scarecrow's old hat, which he had observed to be a favorite perch of the imps, he arranged a noose of light cord. From the noose he ran the cord down the scarecrow's single leg (scarecrows, you know, have usually only one leg), across to the hedge, along the hedge to the house, and up and into his room. He fixed it so it ran without a hitch. He was very proud of it altogether. Much pleased with himself, he got a book and a couple of apples, and seated himself at his window to wait for his chance.

"As it happened, however, the imps were just then away in the meadow, hunting mice. For a whole hour the Boy saw no sign of them. Then, being called away to go on an errand into the village, he tied the end of the cord to his bedpost, and left it with a word of advice to do what it could in his absence.

"Well, it did! For a mere bit of string, all by itself, it didn't do badly. First the old brown rat, with his fierce little eyes and pointed, whiskered nose, came out from under the toolhouse and began exploring the strawberry patch. He didn't think much of strawberries in themselves, but he was apt to find fat grubs and beetles and sleepy June bugs under the cl.u.s.tering leaves. He came upon the string, stretched taut. He was just about to bite it through and try to carry it off to his nest when it occurred to him it might be a trap. He turned away discreetly, and snapped up a plump June bug.

"Then the imps came sailing along. The He imp, with a loud _ca-ah_, perched in the top of a locust and reconnoitred the situation. The She imp alighted on the head of the scarecrow, c.o.c.ked her head to one side, and peered down upon the rat with a wicked and insulting eye.

'_Cr-r-r-r_,' she said sarcastically. But, as the rat paid no attention to her, she hopped up and down on her toes, half-lifting her wings in the effort to attract his eye. She hated to be ignored. But still the rat ignored her, though he saw her perfectly well and would have loved to eat her. At last, in her excitement, she caught sight of the cord running over the edge of the scarecrow's hat. s.n.a.t.c.hing it up in her beak, she gave it an energetic and inquiring tug. She learned something interesting about it at once. It grabbed her by one leg.

"Startled into a panic, as all wild things are at the least suggestion of restraint, she squawked and flapped into the air. The noose tightened rebukingly and pulled her up short.

"For one astounded moment she settled back onto the scarecrow's head, frightened into stillness. Then she tweaked savagely at the cord on her leg, but, of course, could do nothing with it. As far as knots were concerned, her education had been utterly neglected. At last she sprang once more into the air, determined to have nothing more to do with the treacherous scarecrow who had stuck that thing on her leg.

"Of course, she didn't fly far--just about six feet--and she was again brought up with a jerk. And now she went quite wild. Squawking and flapping and whirling round and round, she made an amazing exhibition of herself. Her brother, in the top of the locust, stared down upon her in astonished disapproval. And the brown rat, interested at last, came creeping stealthily to the scarecrow's foot and looked up at her performance with cruel, glinting eyes.

"Now, as you may well imagine, this performance was something which even the imp, strong as she was, could not keep up very long. In about a minute she had to stop and take breath. She was going to alight on the ground, when she remembered the rat. Yes, there he was. So she had to take refuge once more on the hated and treacherous scarecrow.

But no sooner had she done so, alighting with open beak and half-spread, quivering wings, than the rat came darting up the leg of the scarecrow's ragged trousers and pounced at her. She _just_ escaped, and that was all, leaping into the air with a squawk of terror and flapping there violently at the end of those six feet of free cord.

"It was a horrifying position for her, let me tell you--"