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.

Farmer Brown's boy, up in the tree by the nest of Hooty the Owl in
the lonesome corner of the Green Forest, was fighting a battle. No, he
wasn't fighting with Hooty or Mrs. Hooty. He was fighting a battle right
inside himself. It was a battle between right and wrong. Once upon a
time he had taken great delight in collecting the eggs of birds, in
trying to see how many kinds he could get. Then as he had come to know
the little forest and meadow people better, he had seen that taking the
eggs of birds is very, very wrong, and he had stopped stealing them. He
bad declared that never again would he steal an e