When her own bosom was as full of joy as it could be, why should she have turned at the sound of the carving-knife voice to look ashore, and to notice that at its first note there were twenty little pocket-knife answers from over the pond, and that in a twinkling twenty pairs of red satin boots were running as fast as they could go to meet the great speckled mother-hen, whose blady voice was the sweetest music in all the world to them?
When, after quite a long time, Quackalina began to realize things, and thought of the little guineas, and said to herself, "Goodness gracious me!" she looked anxiously ashore for them, but not a red boot could she see. The whole delighted guinea family were at that moment having a happy time away off in the cornfield out of sight and hearing.
This was very startling, and Quackalina grieved a little because she couldn't grieve more. She didn't understand it at all, and it made her almost afraid to go ashore, so she kept her ten little ducklings out upon the water nearly all day.
And now comes a very amusing thing in this story.
When this great, eventful day was passed, and Quackalina was sitting happily among the reeds with her dear ones under her wings, while Sir Sooty waddled proudly around her with the waddle that Quackalina thought the most graceful walk in the world, she began to tell him what had happened, beginning at the time when she noticed that the eggs were wrong.
Sir Sooty listened very indulgently for a while, and then—it is a pity to tell it on him, but he actually burst out laughing, and told her, with the most patronizing quack in the world, that it was "all imagination."
"HER OWN TEN BEAUTIFUL DUCKS WERE CLOSE ABOUT HER"
And when Quackalina insisted with tears and even a sob or two that it was every word true, he quietly looked at her tongue again, and then he said a very long word for a quack doctor. It sounded like 'lucination. And he told Quackalina never, on any account, to tell any one else so absurd a tale, and that it was only a canard—which was very flippant and unkind, in several ways. There are times when even good jokes are out of place.