When I take my Sunday walks in the country, I try to buy a few really
new-laid eggs warm from the nest. At this time of the year (January)
they are very hard to come by, and I have long since invented a sick wife
who has implored me to get her a few eggs laid not earlier than the
self-same morning. Of late, as I am getting older, it has become my
daughter who has just had a little baby. This will generally draw a
new-laid egg, if there is one about the place at all.
At Harrow Weald it has always been my wife who for years has been a great
sufferer and finds a really new-laid egg the one thing she can digest in
the way of solid food. So I turned her on as movingly as I could not
long since, and was at last sold some eggs that were no better than
common shop eggs, if so good. Next time I went I said my poor wife had
been made seriously ill by them; it was no good trying to deceive her;
she could tell a new-laid egg from a bad one as well as any woman in
London, and she had such a high temper that it was very unpleasant for me
when she found herself disappointed.
“Ah! sir,” said the landlady, “but you would not like to lose her.”
“Ma’am,” I replied, “I must not allow my thoughts to wander in that
direction. But it’s no use bringing her stale eggs, anyhow.”
“The Egg that Hen Belonged to”
I got some new-laid eggs a few Sundays ago. The landlady said they were
her own, and talked about them a good deal.
She pointed to one of them and said:
“Now, would you believe it? The egg that hen belonged to laid 53 hens
running and never stopped.”
She called the egg a hen and the hen an egg. One would have thought she
had been reading _Life and Habit_ [p. 134 and passim].