III. The Broken Egg - Page 2

rustle in the leaves over his head. And Sandy Chipmunk looked up quickly.

It seemed to him, at first, that the air was full of monstrous birds. Actually, there were only three of them--Mr. and Mrs. Robin and a neighbor of theirs. But to Sandy they looked six times as big as they really were. That was because they had caught him robbing the nest.

He was so startled that he dropped the eggs. They fell back into the nest--all except one, which broke upon the ground beneath the tree.

"Robber!" Mrs. Robin screamed.

"Thief!" Mr. Robin roared.

"Villain!" their neighbor cried.

It is a wonder they didn't fly straight at Sandy and knock him off the limb.

At first he was too frightened to say a word. But when he saw that he wasn't hurt, Sandy looked down at the broken egg and said:

"What a pity!" He meant it, too. For he thought it was a shame to waste a perfectly good egg like that, when he might have eaten it.

"You don't mean you're sorry, do you?" Mrs. Robin asked him.

"Certainly I am!" Sandy told her. "I was just counting your eggs. And when you startled me, I dropped that one. I thought it must be a hawk, you all made such a noise."

"You're sure you weren't going to eat our eggs?" Mr. Robin inquired.

"Eat them!" Sandy exclaimed. "Why, my mother has often told me not to eat birds' eggs."

When he heard that, Mr. Robin whispered something to his wife. And then he said to Sandy Chipmunk:

"You go home! And don't let me catch you around this tree again!"

Sandy was glad to escape so easily as that. And though he was sorry to have missed a good meal, there was one thing that made him almost happy: He didn't have to bother to wipe his mouth before he let his mother see him.