“I—I didn’t—mean—to break the—the—eggs!” she sobbed. “You s’pose Farmer Joel—you s’pose he’ll be very mad?”
“Of course not!” Mrs. Bunker hastened to say. “He doesn’t mind a few eggs. The hens will lay more.”
“If she’d had on a rubber apron it would have been all right,” said Laddie, as they went on toward the house.
“How do you mean?” Violet, as usual, asked a question.
“Why, if Margy had had on a rubber apron the whites and yellows of the eggs wouldn’t ‘a’ soaked out and she could carry ’em to the kitchen and Norah could make a cake. She says broken eggs are just as good for cakes as other eggs.”
“Yes,” agreed Violet. “’Cause you have to break eggs, anyhow, to get them into a cake. But even if Margy had these in a rubber apron, there’d be a lot of shells.”
“That’s so,” agreed Laddie. “I guess even a rubber apron wouldn’t be much good. The best way is not to break eggs. Now I’m going to make a riddle about them.” And he did. He himself said afterward it wasn’t a very good riddle. Laddie would ask:
“How can you get an egg out of the shell without breaking it?”
And after every one had given up he would answer:
“You can’t.”