er ten little ducklings out
upon the water nearly all day.

And now comes a very amusing thing in this story.

When this great, eventful day was passed, and Quackalina was sitting
happily among the reeds with her dear ones under her wings, while Sir
Sooty waddled proudly around her with the waddle that Quackalina thought
the most graceful walk in the world, she began to tell him what had
happened, beginning at the time when she noticed that the eggs were
wrong.

Sir Sooty listened very indulgently for a while, and then--it is a pity
to tell it on him, but he actually burst out laughing, and told her,
with the most patronizing quack in the world, that it was "all
imagination."

[Illustration: "HER OWN TEN BEAUTIFUL DUCKS WERE CLOSE ABOUT HER"]

And when Quackalina insisted with tears and even a sob or two that it
was every word true, he quietly looked at her tongue again, and then he
said a very long word for a quack doctor. It sounded like 'lucination.
And he told Quackalina never, on any account, to tell any one else so
absurd a tale, and that it was only a canard--which was very flippant
and unkind, in several ways. There are times when even good jokes are
out of place.

At this, Quackalina said that she would take him to the nest and show
him the little pointed egg-shells. And she did take him there, too. Late
at night, when all honest ducks, excepting somnambulists and such as
have vindications on hand, are asleep, Quackalina led the way back to
the old nest. But when she got there, although the clear, white
moonlight lay upon everything and revealed every blade of grass, not a
vestige of nest or straw or shell remained in sight.

The farmer's boy had cleared them all away.

By this time Quackalina began to be mystified herself, and after a
while, seeing only her own ten ducks always near, and never sighting
such a thing as little, flecked, red-booted guineas, she really came to
doubt whether it had all happened or not.

And even to this day she is not quite sure. How she and all her family
finally got away and became happy wild birds again is another story. But
while Quackalina sits and blinks upon the bank among the mallows, with
all her ugly "beautiful" children around her, she sometimes even yet
wonders if the whole thing could have been a nightmare, after all.

But it was no nightmare. It was every word true. If anybody doesn't
believe it, let him ask the guineas.

OLD EASTER

OLD EA