Seed-Babies  by Margaret Warner Morley

Other Eggs

W HEN you once begin to look for things you can always find them. Kittie and the boys saw many eggs that spring besides frogs' eggs.

They found a lot of turtles' eggs, for one thing, and even some snakes' eggs.

And the good old sun hatched these eggs with his warm rays, just as well as if he had been their mother.

The turtles and snakes did not hatch their own eggs. My, no! They left that for the sun to do. They did lay them in the warm sand, though, where the sun could get to them; and there the children found them and left them, and went very often to see them. But do you think they saw the little turtles and snakes? Not a bit of it.

They forgot all about them for a few days, and when they went to look they found it was all over with, and only a lot of empty shells left. They nearly cried, they were so disappointed. Every little turtle and every little snake had gone off about its business, and they could not find one, though they searched a long time.

They found fishes' eggs, too, under the stones in a little stream that ran through a meadow near the house, and these they really did watch hatch into little fishes. For Ko built a wall of stones about the place where the eggs were, loose enough to let the water run in and out, but tight enough to prevent the little fishes from getting away.

That summer, too, the boys and their parents went to the seashore to stay three weeks and took Kittie with them.

There was wading, and bathing, and swimming, and sailing, and in the course of their wadings and sailings the children found many curious things.

What pleased them as well as anything, they found the eggs of many strange creatures.

They found that starfish and sea-urchins lay eggs.

But what surprised them most of all,—they learned that "sea-shells" lay eggs! At least, the animals that live in the shells do.

And such queer cradles as some of these eggs had!

Those of the conch shell were long lines of flat cases like pods, Jack said; and in these pods were the tiniest little conch shells, so very little that they had to look through the magnifying glass to really  see them.

And the sharks' eggs! Safe in their tough black cradles with long tendrils at the four corners, they lay. The tendrils, they were told, fastened the sharks' eggs to the weeds and things in the bottom of the sea, so they wouldn't be dashed about by the waves, and the baby sharks could have a chance to grow in safety.

"I don't see why such ugly things as sharks, that sometimes eat people up, need have their eggs so well cared for," Kittie said, one day.

"Everything's  eggs are cared for," Jack said, "and I believe almost everything lays eggs, too."

"Everything that's alive has to come out of an egg or a seed, I believe," said Ko.

And he wasn't so very far wrong!