Sandy Chipmunk smiled as he peered into the robin's nest. The four greenish-blue eggs that he saw there looked very good to him. And he smacked his lips—though his mother had often told him not to. He was just picking the eggs out of the nest when he heard a rustle in the leaves over his head. And Sandy Chipmunk looked up quickly.
It seemed to him, at first, that the air was full of monstrous birds. Actually, there were only three of them—Mr. and Mrs. Robin and a neighbor of theirs. But to Sandy they looked six times as big as they really were. That was because they had caught him robbing the nest.
He was so startled that he dropped the eggs. They fell back into the nest—all except one, which broke upon the ground beneath the tree.
"Robber!" Mrs. Robin screamed.
"Thief!" Mr. Robin roared.
"Villain!" their neighbor cried.
It is a wonder they didn't fly straight at Sandy and knock him off the limb.
At first he was too frightened to say a word. But when he saw that he wasn't hurt, Sandy looked down at the broken egg and said:
"What a pity!" He meant it, too. For he thought it was a shame to waste a perfectly good egg like that, when he might have eaten it.
"You don't mean you're sorry, do you?" Mrs. Robin asked him.