Jehosophat looked him all over.
"Why, he looks like a duck."
"What did you expect?" laughed the Toyman. "He is a duck. Old Mother Wyandotte thinks he's her child, but he's only a step-child. Ha! Ha! Somebody must have put another egg in her nest."
Over in the garden were pretty flowers called Bleeding Hearts. They were very pink, and Jehosophat's face turned the very same colour. Well he knew who had stolen into the House of the White Wyandottes and put that big duck's egg under Old Mother Hen. And now it had turned out a real little duckling, that black little fellow Mother Wyandotte was scolding so.
"Don't—don't—don't—don't you do it," she was shouting still.
But little black Duckie had made up his mind. He was headed straight for that shining water.
Around Mother Wyandotte gathered all her relatives to talk over the matter. They were disgusted. That one of their family should disgrace them so!
"Respectable chickens spend their time on the ground," said Granny Wyandotte with a toss of her comb, "and never, never get wet, if they can help it, not even their feet."
"True—true—quite true," all the Wyandotte Aunties agreed.
But their second cousins and the third cousins too, the ducks and the geese and the swans, said they were wrong.