The Stork Who Married a Dumb Wife

A DANISH STORK was in the habit of spending six nights a week out on the town with the boys, drinking and dicing and playing the match game. His wife had never left their nest, which was on a chimney top, since he married her, for he did not want her to get wise to the ways of the male. When he got home, which was usually at four o’clock in the morning—unless the party had gone on to Reuben’s—he always brought her a box of candy and handed it to her together with a stork story, which is the same as a cock-and-bull story. “I’ve been out delivering babies,” he would say. “It’s killing me, but it is my duty to go on.” “Who do you deliver babies for?” she asked one morning. “Human beings,” he said. “A human being cannot have a baby without help from someone. All the other animals can, but human beings are helpless. They depend on the other animals for everything from food and clothing to companionship.” Just then the phone rang and the stork answered it. “Another baby on the way,” he said when he had hung up. “I’ll have to go out again tonight.” So that night he went out again and did not get home until seven-thirty in the morning. “Thish was very special case,” he said, handing his wife a box of candy. “Five girls.” He did not add that the five girls were all blondes in their twenties.

After a while the female stork got to thinking. Her husband had told her never to leave the nest, because the world was full of stork traps, but she began to doubt this. So she flew out into the world, looking and listening. In this way she learned to tell time and to take male talk with a grain of salt; she found out that candy is dandy, as the poet has said, but that licker is quicker; she discovered that the offspring of the human species are never brought into the world by storks. This last discovery was a great blow to her, but it was a greater blow to Papa when he came home the next morning at a quarter to six. “Hello, you phony obstetrician,” said his wife coldly. “How are all the blonde quintuplets today?” And she crowned him with a chimney brick.

MORAL: The male was made to lie and roam, but woman’s place is in the home.