yard craned their necks, blinked, and didn't swallow another berry for
fully ten seconds. And a beautiful green caterpillar, that had seen the
great red rooster mark him with his evil eye, and expected to be gobbled
up in a twinkling, had time to "hump himself" and crawl under a leaf
before the astonished rooster recovered from the noise. This is a case
where the firing of a gun saved at least one life. I wonder how many
butterflies owe their lives to that gun?

As to the ducks in the clump of mallows that caught the volley, they
simply tumbled over and gave themselves up for dead.

[Illustration: "THE FARMER'S BOY WAS A HUNTER"]

The heroine of our little story, Lady Quackalina Blackwing, stayed in a
dead faint for fully seventeen seconds, and the first thing she knew
when she "came to" was that she was lying under the farmer boy's coat in
an old basket, and that there was a terrific rumbling in her ears and a
sharp pain in one wing, that something was sticking her, that Sir Sooty
was nowhere in sight, and that she wanted her mother and all her
relations.

Indeed, as she began to collect her senses, while she lay on top of the
live crab that pinched her chest with his claw, she realized that there
was not a cousin in the world, even to some she had rather disliked,
that she would not have been most happy to greet at this trying moment.

The crab probably had no unfriendly intention. He was only putting up
the best hand he had, trying to find some of his own kindred. He had
himself been lying in a hole in shallow water when the farmer's boy
raked him in and changed the whole course of his existence.

He and the duck knew each other by sight, but though they were both "in
the swim," they belonged to different sets, and so were small comfort to
one another on this journey to the farm.

They both knew some English, and as the farmer's boy spoke part English
and part "farm," they understood him fairly well when he was telling the
man digging potatoes in the field that he was going to "bile" the crab
in a tomato can and to make a "decoy" out of the duck.

"Bile" and "decoy" were new words to the listeners in the basket, but
they both knew about tomato cans. The bay and "Tarrup Crik" were strewn
with them, and the crab had once hidden in one, half imbedded in the
sand, when he was a "soft-shell." He knew their names, because he had
studied them before their labels soaked off, and he knew there was no
malice in them f