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Certain it is, however, that when Quackalina finally decided to be satisfied to begin sitting, there were exactly ten eggs in the nest–just enough for her to cover well with her warm down and feathers.

“Sitting-time” may seem stupid to those who are not sitting; but Quackalina’s breast was filled with a gentle content as she sat, day by day, behind the golden-rod, and blinked and reflected and listened for the dear “paddle, paddle” of Sir Sooty’s feet, and his loving “qua’, qua'”–a sort of caressing baby-talk that he had adopted in speaking to her ever since she had begun her long sitting.

Quackalina was a patient little creature, and seldom left her nest, so that when she did so for a short walk in the glaring sun, she was apt to be dizzy and to see strange spots before her eyes. But this would all pass away when she got back to her cozy nest in the cool shade.

But one day it did not pass away–it got worse, or, at least, she thought it did. Instead of ten eggs in the nest she seemed to see twenty, and they were of a strange, dull color, and their shape seemed all wrong. She blinked her eyes nineteen times, and even rubbed them with her web-feet, so that she might not see double, but it was all in vain. Before her dazzled eyes twenty little pointed eggs lay, and when she sat upon them they felt strange to her breast. And then she grew faint and was too weak even to call Sir Sooty, but when he came waddling along presently, he found her so pale around the bill that he made her put out her tongue, and examined her symptoms generally.

Sir Sooty was not a regular doctor, but he was a very good quack, and she believed in him, which, in many cases, is the main thing.

So when he grew so tender that his words were almost like “qu, qu,” and told her that she had been confined too closely and was threatened with foie gras, she only sighed and closed her eyes, and, keeping her fears to herself, hoped that the trouble was all in her eyes indeed–or her liver.

Now the sad part of this tale is that the trouble was not with poor little Quackalina’s eyes at all. It was in the nest. The same farmer’s boy who had kept her sitting of eggs down to ten by taking out one every day until poor Quackalina’s patience was worn out–the same boy who had not used her as a decoy only because he wanted her to stay at home and raise little decoy-ducks–this boy it was who had now chosen to take her ten beautiful eggs and put them under a guinea-hen, and to fetch the setting of twenty guinea eggs for Quackalina to hatch out.

He did this just because, as he said, “That old black duck ‘ll hatch out as many eggs again as a guinea-hen will, an’ the guinea ‘ll cover her ten eggs easy. I’m goin’ to swap ’em.” And “swap ’em” he did.

Nobody knows how the guinea-hen liked her sitting, for none but herself and the boy knew where her nest was hidden in a pile of old rubbish down by the cow-pond.

When a night had passed, and a new day showed poor Quackalina the twenty little eggs actually under her breast–eggs so little that she could roll two at once under her foot–she did not know what to think. But like many patient people when great sorrows come, she kept very still and never told her fears.

She had never seen a guinea egg before in all her life. There were birds’ nests in some of the reeds along shore, and she knew their little toy eggs. She knew the eggs of snakes, too, and of terrapins, or “tarrups,” as they are called by the farmer folk along the bay.