enough. Striped Chipmunk, watching Blacky
from the old stone wall, saw something white drop from Blacky's claws.
He saw Blacky dash after it and clutch at it only to miss it. Then the
white thing struck a branch of an old apple tree, bounced off and fell
to the ground. Blacky followed it.

Striped Chipmunk stole very softly through the grass to see what Blacky
was doing. Blacky was standing close beside a white thing that
looked very much like an egg. He was looking at it with the queerest
expression.

Now and then he would reach out and rap it sharply with his bill, and
then look as if he didn't know what to make of it. He didn't. That egg
wasn't behaving right. It should have broken when it hit the branch of
the apple tree. Certainly it should have broken when he struck it that
way with his bill. However was he to eat that egg, if he couldn't break
the shell? Blacky didn't know.

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 i