Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 162.djvu/286

274 its prison walls. The father, meanwhile, stood by, swelling with legitimate pride.

"It is your very image, my love," said the happy young mother.

"But the bill is like yours, dearest," he replied. "It has just the self-same elegant, high-bred cut which conquered my heart the first time I beheld it peeping out from behind the great Pyramid."

Three other infant storks made their appearance in succession; each of them had inherited its father's splendid figure and the elegant bill of the mother. Then, after a pause of two or three days, the dull-green egg likewise cracked and opened, and the fifth stork was born.

This was a very peculiar stork indeed, in whom not even the most infatuated parent could detect the shadow of a family likeness. The mother, who happened to be alone in the nest at the moment of its appearance, stared at it in bewildered consternation. How came she by this thick-set, short-legged, canary-colored infant?

"That all comes of laying eggs in one's sleep!" she said to herself. "Next year I shall be wiser, and manage better." Then, as a true mother is always doubly tender towards a deformed child, she spread out her wings and gave it the warmest corner in the nest.

Presently the male stork returned, bearing a juicy frog fresh from the market, and deposited it in the open bill of his eldest son, who greedily stretched out his neck for it from under the mother's wing.

"How about that fifth egg, my love?" he tenderly inquired of his spouse. "If it does not open to-day, we must throw it out, for it is probably bad, and you are tiring yourself needlessly by sitting on it; your beak is looking pale already. Does it show no signs of cracking yet?"

"Why, yes," said the wife, in a slightly embarrassed manner. "It is cracked — in fact it is opened already; but I fear the poor infant is not very healthy. It looks, in fact, rather — rather — "

"Rather what?" asked the husband, in surprise.

"Well, just rather queer, my love," she answered.

"Let me see it," said he.

She moved aside timidly, disclosing the canary-colored addition to the family. The father-stork gazed on it in silence for a minute, then turned it over scrutinizingly with his bill.

"Well, what do you think of it?" asked the mother anxiously. "It seems very delicate, does it not?"

"What do I think of it? You dare to ask me what I think of it?" he said, suddenly exploding into rage. "What I think is, that you are a faithless bird, and have betrayed me!"

"My love!" gasped the terrified wife, "what can you mean?"

"Look at its bill, madam; have you ever seen a respectable stork with a beak like that? Look at its color; listen to its wretched, squeaking voice" — for the luckless fledgling, painfully surprised at the rough handling of its supposed father, was by this time piping most piteously.

"But I hatched it as carefully as any of the others," said the mother deprecatingly. "Indeed it is not my fault. I suppose it must have been because I laid the egg in the night-time."

"Night-time indeed!" said the incensed male. "Does an honest bird lay her eggs in the night? Why did you lay it in the night? Only because you did not dare to lay it in the day-time. Will you have the audacity to say that this is a son of mine? It surely more resembles those wretched, waddling creatures in the courtyard below. Just look at its leg; look, I pray you, madam, on this leg, and on that," he continued, proudly displaying his admirable scarlet limb, straight and shining as a stick of superfine sealing-wax. Of course the bird knew nothing of "Hamlet," but storks as well as peasants often quote Shakespeare unconsciously. "My family has always been celebrated for the length and beauty of its legs. Why, those are not legs at all, — wretched, deformed stumps."

"Perhaps the legs will grow, my dear," she said plaintively.

"I shall not give them much time to grow," he replied irately; and with one jerk of his scarlet bill, he had flung the youngest nestling roughly out, and it lay expiring on the dunghill below.

"As for you, madam, I suppose you know what to expect. There is a code of honor among storks; and you do not imagine that I shall suffer myself to be betrayed for a wretched, waddling duck."

He flew off in high dudgeon; and as his mighty wings cleft the air, he kept muttering to himself, after the fashion of storks, — Presently the air was darkened, as though by a passing thundercloud. The hapless wife looked up, and her heart