“Here’s where we’ll have our picnic,” said Mother Duck.
She put down the basket, and unpacked the food, and then she and the ducklings sat down around it, and ate and ate. And how good it all tasted! Just as food always does on picnics.
After they had all finished, and could eat no more, Mother Duck said, “Come now; let us climb up to the top of the rocks and see what we can see.”
So he got right under the rain-pipe where the water spouted hardest
That was fun, too—clambering up over the rocks. The ducklings scrambled and slipped and queeked, and their mother helped them; so after a while they found themselves on the very tip top of the highest rock of all, and oh, how the wind did blow up there.
“Now look!” said Mother Duck. “Do you see over there?” and she pointed with her wing to a farmyard in the distance. “That is where I used to live.”
“Why, mother,” cried the ducklings, “we thought you’d always lived down by the river in our tree!”
“No, indeed; I lived right there in that farmyard,” answered their mother; and then she began to tell them about it, and of her life there, and of how if she had stayed there they might have had a hen for their mother instead of her. That seemed a horrible thing to the little ducklings—that they might have had some other mother instead of their own. They wanted to know what a hen was, because of course they had never seen one, living where they did. Their mother tried to tell them, but they could not understand very well.