Scrambled Eggs

Eustace, a courteous drake with a talent for self-importance, finds his domestic life thrown into comic turmoil when his modern-minded wife Gertrude refuses to keep brooding on their eggs. Their quarrel opens into a sharp satire of marriage, gender roles, and "progress," and when Gertrude abandons the nest, Eustace reluctantly takes over incubation himself—only to be mocked by the rooster Clarence and driven into humiliating denial. Gossip, vanity, and mistaken accusations soon spread through the barnyard, until Gertrude exposes the absurdity of the scandal and turns the joke back on Clarence and Martha the hen. From there, the story widens into a sly critique of meddling, moral advice, and marital illusion. Eustace tries to reform Martha's troubled marriage to Clarence, but his earnest lectures only deepen her confusion, and when she later discovers Clarence's infidelity, she blames Eustace for unsettling her faith. Meanwhile, Eustace is shaken by his own attraction to Phyllis, a captivating newcomer who draws him into a painful conflict between desire and duty. Exile, loss, and a looming human threat then push the barnyard satire toward darker suspense, as Eustace struggles to awaken a complacent community to danger before the Monster arrives. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.