On the roof of the last house in a little village was a stork's nest. The mother stork sat in it with her four young ones, who stuck out their heads with their little black beaks. (You see, their beaks had not yet turned red as they would in time.) And a little way off, all alone on the ridge of the roof, stood Father Stork, very upright and stiff. He was really a sentry on guard but, so that he would not be entirely idle, he had drawn up one leg. My, how grand he looked, standing there on one leg! So still you might have thought he was carved from wood!
"It must look pretty fine for my wife to have a sentry standing by her nest!" he thought. "People don't know I'm her husband; they'll think I'm a servant, ordered to stand here on guard. It looks very smart, I must say."
So he went on, standing on one leg.
A crowd of children were playing down in the street, and, as soon as they saw the storks, one of the boldest boys, followed by the others, began to sing the old song about storks. They sang it just as their leader remembered it:
"Stork, stork, long-legged stork,
Off to your wife you'd better fly.
She's waiting for you in the nest,
Rocking four young ones to rest.
"The first he will be hanged,
The second will be stabbed,
The third he will be burned,
And the fourth will be slapped!"
"Just listen to what they are saying!" cried the little stork children. "They say we're going to be hanged and burned!"
"Don't pay any attention to that," replied the mother stork crossly. "Don't listen to them, and then it won't make any difference."
But the boys went on singing and pointing mockingly at the storks with their fingers. Only one boy, whose name was Peter, said it was a shame to make fun of the birds, and he wouldn't join the others.
The mother stork tried to comfort her children. "Don't let that bother you at all," she said. "Look how quietly your father is standing, and only on one leg, too!"
"But we're very much frightened!" insisted the young storks, and they drew their heads far back into the nest.
Next day, when the children came out to play and saw the storks, they began their song again:
"The first he will be hanged,
The second will be burned!"
"Are we really going to be hanged and burned?" asked the young storks.
"No, certainly not", replied their mother. "You're going to learn to fly! I'll teach you. Then we'll fly out over the meadows and visit the frogs; they'll bow down to us in the water and sing, 'Co-ax! Co-ax!' and then we'll eat them up. That'll be a lot of fun!"
"And then what?" asked the young storks.
"Then the storks from all over the country will assemble for the autumn maneuvers," their mother continued. "And it is of great importance that you know how to fly well then, for if you can't, the general will stab you dead with his beak; so when I start to teach you, pay attention and learn well."
"Oh, then we'll be stabbed, just the way the boys say! And listen, there they go, saying it again!"
"Never mind them; pay attention to me," said Mother Stork. "After the big maneuvers, we'll fly away to the warm countries, oh, so far away from here, over mountains and forests. We'll get to Egypt, where they have four-cornered houses of stone that come up to a point higher than the clouds. They call them pyramids, and they're even older than a stork could imagine. They have a river there too, that runs out of its banks, and turns the whole land to mud! We walk about in that mud, eating frogs."
"Oh!" cried the young storks.
"Yes, indeed. It's wonderful there. You don't do anything but eat all day long. And while we're so comfortable there, back here there isn't a green leaf left on the trees, and it's so cold that the clouds freeze to pieces and fall down in little white rags."