LETTERS FROM AN OREGON RANCH
hats,” he murmured reminiscently, as he marched off with it. During his absence I got out the long-unused Dover eggbeater and two bowls of large size, put the skillet on the stove, and stood ready for the fray. After some anxious waiting, in walked the gentleman with the basket bottom-side up, and never an egg in it. I stood in speechless amazement, looking at that empty basket, until Tom cried,—
“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.”
“Well, let it break; that would be better than slow starvation!”
“You are disappointed now, aren’t you, Katharine?”
“Of course I am, and I’m hungry, and I thought it was a hen’s business to lay eggs; and as we have forty-eight of them—”
“You thought,” he interrupted, “that we would get forty-eight eggs, did you?”
I’ll just tell you in confidence, Nell, that I had thought of forty-eight in my most sanguine moments; but now, under the amused looks of my inquisitor, I snapped out, “Of course not; I’m not so much of an innocent as to expect to leap from nothing to such sudden affluence; but I did look for two dozen eggs or so,—and it was not at all unreasonable, with all that mob of hens!”
“Come to think of it,” meekly answered the bearer
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