t enough for her to cover well with her warm down and feathers.

"Sitting-time" may seem stupid to those who are not sitting; but
Quackalina's breast was filled with a gentle content as she sat, day by
day, behind the golden-rod, and blinked and reflected and listened for
the dear "paddle, paddle" of Sir Sooty's feet, and his loving "qua',
qua'"--a sort of caressing baby-talk that he had adopted in speaking to
her ever since she had begun her long sitting.

[Illustration: "'I'M GOIN' TO SWAP 'EM'"]

Quackalina was a patient little creature, and seldom left her nest,
so that when she did so for a short walk in the glaring sun, she was apt
to be dizzy and to see strange spots before her eyes. But this would all
pass away when she got back to her cozy nest in the cool shade.

But one day it did not pass away--it got worse, or, at least, she
thought it did. Instead of ten eggs in the nest she seemed to see
twenty, and they were of a strange, dull color, and their shape seemed
all wrong. She blinked her eyes nineteen times, and even rubbed them
with her web-feet, so that she might not see double, but it was all in
vain. Before her dazzled eyes twenty little pointed eggs lay, and when
she sat upon them they felt strange to her breast. And then she grew
faint and was too weak even to call Sir Sooty, but when he came waddling
along presently, he found her so pale around the bill that he made her
put out her tongue, and examined her symptoms generally.

Sir Sooty was not a regular doctor, but he was a very good quack, and
she believed in him, which, in many cases, is the main thing.

So when he grew so tender that his words were almost like "qu, qu," and
told her that she had been confined too closely and was threatened with
_foie gras_, she only sighed and closed her eyes, and, keeping her fears
to herself, hoped that the trouble was all in her eyes indeed--or her
liver.

Now the sad part of this tale is that the trouble was not with poor
little Quackalina's eyes at all. It was in the nest. The same farmer's
boy who had kept her sitting of eggs down to ten by taking out one every
day until poor Quackalina's patience was worn out--the same boy who had
not used her as a decoy only because he wanted her to stay at home and
raise little decoy-ducks--this boy it was who had now chosen to take her
ten beautiful eggs and put them under a guinea-hen, and to fetch the
setting of twenty guinea eggs for Quackalina to hatch out.

H