on tiptoe, trying to peep inside the cover.

"Guess!" said papa, laughing. "A nickel to the one who guesses right!"

"Candy!" cried Laurence.

"Oranges!" said Dorothy.

Papa shook his head at both these guesses, and at all the others that
followed, until they had reached the house.

"Now let mamma have a turn," he said, holding the dinner pail up to her
ear.

"Why, it isn't--" mamma began, with a look of greatest surprise.

"Yes, it is!" papa declared. Then he took off the cover and tipped the
pail gently over in the middle of the kitchen table and out came ten of
the fluffiest, downiest little chickens that any of them had ever seen.

"Oh, oh, oh!" cried the children delightedly. "Are they really ours?
Where did you get them?"

"They are power-house chickens," papa replied, smiling at their
enthusiasm--"hatched right in the engine room!"

"What do you mean?" asked mamma in astonishment, gazing at the pretty
little creatures.

"Just what I say," replied papa, who was an engineer in the big power