One morning I thought I heard a faint noise. Routing out the good old creature, that I might take observations, eggs still, and no chickens, were discernible, but the tiniest, little, silvery, sunny-hearted chirp that you ever heard, inside the eggs, and a little, tender pecking from every imprisoned chick, standing at his crystal door, and, with his faint, fairy knock, knock, knock, craving admission into the great world. Never can I forget or describe the sensations of that moment; and, as promise rapidly culminated in performance,--as the eggs ceased to be eggs, and analyzed themselves into shattered shells and chirping chickens,--it seemed as if I had been transported back to the beginning of creation. Right before my eyes I saw, in my hands I held, the mystery of life. These eggs, that had been laid under my very eyes as it were, that I had my own self hunted and found and confiscated and restored,--these eggs that I had broken and eaten a thousand times, and learned of a surety to be nothing but eggs,--were before me now; and, lo, they were eyes and feathers and bill and claws! Yes, little puff-ball, I saw you when you were hard and cold and had no more life than a Lima bean. I might have scrambled you, or boiled you, or made a pasch-egg of you, and you would not have known that anything was happening. If you had been cooked then, you would have been only an omelet; now you may be a fricassee. As I looked at the nest, so lately full only of white quiet, now swarming with downy life, and vocal with low, soft music, "I felt a newer life in every gale." Oh, no one can tell, till he has chickens of his own, what delicious emotions are stirred in the heart by their downy, appealing tenderness!