" said Bunny. "I guess that's it, Sue."

"Ha! Ha! Yes, that's it!" a voice exclaimed behind Bunny and Sue. They
looked around to see their Grandpa Brown looking at them and laughing.

"The old hen doesn't know what to make of her little family going in
swimming," he went on. "You see, we put ducks' eggs under a hen to
hatch, Bunny and Sue. A hen can hatch any kind of eggs."

"Can a hen hatch ockstritches' eggs?" Sue wanted to know.

"Well, maybe not the eggs of an ostrich," answered Grandpa Brown. "I
guess a hen could only cover one of those at a time. But a hen can hatch
ducks' or turkeys' eggs as well as her own kind."

"So as we don't always have a duck that wants to hatch out little ones,
we put the ducks' eggs under a hen. And every time, as soon as the
little ducks find water, after they are hatched, they go in for a swim,
just as if they had a duck for a mother instead of a hen.

"And, of course, the mother hen thinks she has little chickens, for at
first she can't tell the little ducks from chickens. And when they go
into the water she thinks, just as you did, Sue, that they will be
drowned. So she makes a great fuss. But she soon gets over it."

"I guess she's over it now," said Bunny.

Indeed, the old mother hen was not clucking so loudly now, nor was she
rushing up and down on the shore of the pond with her wings all fluffed
up. She seemed to know that the little family she had hatched out, even
if they were not like any others she had taken care of, were all right,
and very nice. And she seemed to think that for them to go in the water
was all right, too.

As for the little ducklings, they paddled about, and quacked and
whistled (as baby ducks always do) and had a perfectly lovely time. The
old mother hen stood on the bank and watched them.

Pretty soon the ducks had had enough of swimming, and they came out on
dry land, waddling from side to side in the funny way ducks do when they
walk.

"Oh! How glad the old hen is to see them safe on shore again!" cried
Sue.

And, indeed, the mother hen did seem glad to have her family with her
once more. She clucked over them, and tried to hover them under her warm
wings, thinking, maybe, that she would dry them after their bath.

But ducks' feathers do not get wet in the water the way the feathers of
chickens do, for ducks feathers have a sort of oil in them. So the
little ducks did not need to get dry. They ran about in the sun,
quacking in their baby v