The next day Mrs. Henderson adroitly substituted hen's eggs for the
wild ducks' own, and the shy, pretty water fowls, returning from
their morning's swim, never discovered the fraud. [Fact.]
"Six eggs under three sitters--eighteen chicks, if we're lucky
enough to have secured fertile eggs," mused Mrs. Henderson. "Oh,
well, we'll see." And they _did_ see. They saw exactly eighteen
fluffy, peeping chicks, whose timid little mothers could not
understand why their broods disappeared one by one from the long,
wet grasses surrounding the nest. But in a warm canton flannel
lined basket near the Henderson's stove the young arrivals chirped
and picked at warm meal as sturdily as if hatched in a coop by a
commonplace barnyard "Biddy." And every one of those chicks lived
and grew and fattened into a splendid flock, and the following
spring they began sitting on their own eggs. But the good-hearted
woman, in relating the story, would always say that she felt like
a thief and a robber whenever she thought of that shy, harmless
little wild duck who never had the satisfaction of seeing her brood
swim in the "slough."
All this happened more than twenty years ago, yet when I met Mrs.
Henderson last autumn, as she was journeying to Prince Albert to
visit a married daughter, her wonderfully youthful face was as
round and smiling as if she had never battled through the years
in a hand-to-hand fight to secure a home in the pioneer days
of Manitoba.
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