THE NEW TENANTS.


By Elanora Kinsley Marble.


The next day Mrs. Jenny retired into the tin pot, and later, when Mr. Wren peeped in, lo! an egg, all spotted with red and brown, lay upon the soft lining of the nest.

“It’s quite the prettiest thing in the world,” proudly said Mr. Wren. “Why, my dear, I don’t believe your cousin, Mrs. John Wren, ever laid one like it. It seems to me those spots upon the shell are very remarkable. I shouldn’t be surprised if the bird hatched from that shell will make a name for himself in bird-land some day, I really shouldn’t.”

“You foolish fellow,” laughed Mrs. Wren, playfully pecking him with her bill, “if you were a Goose your Goslings, in your eyes, would all be Swans. That’s what I heard our landlady say to her husband last night, out on the porch, when he wondered which one of his boys would be president of the United States.”

Mr. Wren chuckled in a truly papa-like manner and pecked her bill in return, then fairly bubbling over with happiness flew to a neighboring limb, and burst into such a merry roundelay, one note tumbling over another in Wren fashion, that every member of the household came out to hear and see.