of all
of us and our parents?"

"I'm sure I don't know--" Poetry said, with a worried voice.

Just that minute Pop called from the barn and said, "BILL, HURRY UP
AND GATHER THE EGGS! IT'LL BE TOO DARK TO SEE IN THE BARN AS SOON AS
THE SUN GOES DOWN! POETRY, BE SURE TO COME AGAIN SOME TIME," which was
Pop's way of telling Poetry to step on the gas and get going home
right now, which Poetry did, and I went back to the house and got the
egg basket to start to gather the eggs, wondering what would happen
next.

6

Just as I started to open our kitchen door and go out to the barn, Mom
came from the other room where she'd been talking on the phone and
said, "Little Jim's mother is coming down with the flu, and won't be
able to go to church tomorrow, so we're to pick up Little Jim and also
stop for Tom Till and take him to church with _us_.... We'll have to
get up a little earlier tomorrow morning, so you get the chores done
quick so we can get supper over and to bed nice and early," which I
thought was a good idea. I was already tired all of a sudden, almost
too tired to gather the eggs.

Tomorrow, though, would be a fine day. It'd be fun stopping at Little
Jim's and Tom Till's houses and take them to church with us.

Little Jim had something on his mind that was bothering him, though,
and I wondered what it was. Also, I wondered who was coming to our
house for dinner tomorrow. Maybe it would be Little Jim, as _well_ as
somebody else, if his mom was going to have the flu.

Pretty soon I was up in our haymow all by myself carrying the egg
basket around to the different places where different ones of our
old hens laid their eggs. Old Bent-comb still laid her daily egg up
in a corner of the mow so I climbed away up over a big stack of
sweet-smelling hay to where I knew the nest was. I wasn't feeling very
good inside on account of things hadn't gone right during the day, and
yet I couldn't tell what was wrong, except maybe it was just me. When
I got to old Bent-comb's nest, sure enough there were two eggs in
it--one was the pretty white egg Bent-comb herself had laid that day
and the other was an artificial glass egg which we kept in the nest
all the time just to encourage any hen that might see it, to stop and
lay an egg there herself, just as if maybe there had been another hen
who had thought it was a good place to lay an egg. It was easy to fool
old Bent-comb, I thought.

While I was getting ready to go bac