140 A PROBLEM IN BLACK. 
to catch in half-an-hour would not have kept 
a healthy spider, let alone a big old rook, 
alive. 
Then—mark ‘how oft the sight of means 
to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done ’—there 
came the cackling of the hen. It came from 
a neighbouring field, and it was the cackle 
of a foolish hen who, having laid an egg, 
cannot refrain from letting all the world know 
about it. Now, in the wild it is better to 
hold your tongue about everything, especially 
eggs. 
Even our rook could have told the hen that, 
but he didn’t care to. Heaven has sent fools 
into the world that smart ones, like the rook, 
may live. 
You see him lift and fly heavily with his 
rounded wings to a neighbouring tree. You 
see him seated in that tree surveying, with an 
eye trained to the job from infancy, the next 
field, and all that therein lay. 
Then you see him gliding down on rigid 
wings to the fowl-house—gliding down, settling, 
and hopping inside. It was stuffy, smelly, 
hot, and none too clean in there, and the old 
rook was mightily afraid, but hunger drove 
him. In the space of one wink he had con- 
sumed the newly-laid hen’s egg; in the space 
of another wink he had driven his beak 
