o difficulty at all. He was less impetuous and more
sagacious than his sister.

"After this the parents continued to feed their independent offspring
for a number of days, just because they had been accustomed to feed
their nestling for a certain length of time, till at last the
youngsters started off to forage on their own account, and the family,
as a family, broke up. From habit, however, or from good will, the
youngsters kept coming back to roost on the branches beside the nest,
and remained on the most friendly, though easy-going, relations with
their father and mother.

"In every crow flock, large or small, there seems to be some kind of
discipline, some kind of obedience to the wise old leaders of the
flock. But the two black imps of Pine-Top were apparently, for the
time at least, exempted from it. They did about as they liked and were
a nuisance to everybody but their two selves, whom they admired
immensely. Being too young for the old crows to take seriously, their
pranks were tolerated, or they would soon have been pecked and beaten
into better manners. Too big and too grown-up for the young
crows--whom they visited in their nests and tormented till driven away
by the indignant parents--they had no associates but each other. So
they followed their own whims; and the flock was philosophically
indifferent as to what might happen to them.

"You must not think, however, that they did not learn anything, these
two. They were sharp. They listened to what was being said around
them, and the crows, you know, are the greatest talkers ever; so they
soon knew the difference between a man with a gun and a man without
one. They knew that an owl in the daytime is not the same thing as an
owl at night. They gathered that a scarecrow is not as dangerous as it
looks. And many other things that a crow needs to know and believe
they condescended to learn, because learning came easy to them. But
common caution they did not learn, because it did not seem to them
either interesting or necessary. So it was often just luck that got
them out of scrapes, though they always thought it was their own
cleverness.

"It was just lucky, of course, that day when they went exploring in the
patch of dark woods down in the valley, that the big brown owl did not
get one or the other of them. He was asleep on a big dead branch as
brown as himself, and looking so like a part of it that they were just
going to alight, either upon