ays old, and a baby at that
age does not remember much.

Although he was too young to realize it, those first ten days after he
had come out of his shell, and those before that, while he was growing
inside his shell, were in some ways the most important of his life, for
it was then that he needed the most tender and skillful care. Well, he
had it; for the gentleness and skill of Father and Mother Crow left
nothing to be desired. They had built the best possible nest for their
needs by placing strong sticks criss-cross high up in an old pine tree.
For a lining they had stripped soft stringy bark from a wild grapevine,
and had finished off with a bit of still softer dried grass.

In this Mother Crow had laid her five bluish-green eggs marked with
brown; and she and Father Crow had shared, turn and turn about, the long
task of keeping their babies inside those beautiful shells warm enough
so that they could grow.

And grow they did, into five as homely little objects as ever broke
their way out of good-looking eggshells. There was not down on their
bodies to make them fluffy and pretty, like Peter Piper's children. They
were just sprawling little bits of crow-life, so helpless that it would
have been quite pitiful if they had not had a good patient mother and a
father who seemed never to get tired of hunting for food.

Now, it takes a very great deal of food for five young crows, because
each one on some days will eat more than half his own weight and beg for
more. Dear, dear! how they did beg! Every time either Father or Mother
Crow came back to the nest, those five beaks would open so wide that the
babies seemed to be yawning way down to the end of their red throats.
Oh, the food that got stuffed into them! Good and nourishing, every bit
of it; for a proper diet is as important to a bird baby as to a human
one. Juicy caterpillars--a lot of them: enough to eat up a whole
berry-patch if the crows hadn't found them; nutty-flavored
grasshoppers--a lot of them, too; so many, in fact, that it looked very
much as if crows were the reason the grasshoppers were so nearly wiped
out that year that they didn't have a chance to trouble the farmers'
crops; and now and then a dainty egg was served them in the most
tempting crow-fashion, that is, right from the beak of the parent.

For, as you no doubt have heard, a crow thinks no more of helping
himself to an egg of a wild bird than we do of visiting the nests of
tame birds, such