CHAPTER NINE.
ANOTHER TURN OF FORTUNE'S WHEEL.
Master Rayburn received the raven's addled egg, and gave Ram Jennings a groat for his trouble, and for telling him all about how it was obtained, and what followed, keeping the man, and questioning him a good deal, as he smiled and frowned over the task he began at once, that of chipping a good-sized hole in one side of the egg, and extracting its contents in a little wooden bowl of clean water.
At last, after a great deal of sniffing and shuffling about, the man said, "Done with me, Master Rayburn ?" "Yes," said the old man sharply.

"Unless you can tell me any more.

But why ?" "Well, master, I'm pretty hard about the smell, and it falls to me to clean out the pigsties; and when they've been left a month or two in the summer, and got pretty ripe, they aren't so nice as bean-fields in bloom, or the young missus's roses in her bit o' garden; but pigsties aren't nothing to that there _egg_.

It's enough to pyson a black dog." "Be off with you, then," said the old man, with a dry chuckle; and as soon as he was alone, he threw the foul water away.

"Yes," he muttered, "it does smell; but that's a splendid egg, and not stained a bit." "Hah!" he ejaculated a few minutes later.