Speckled lilliputian wonders

Behold these speckled lilliputian wonders! Aren't these little quail eggs perfectly darling? A local market carries them regularly, and not just at Easter when all manner of eggs—plastic and organic—are ubiquitous. I love the varying dotted egg exterior, and how the inside of the shell is lined every so faintly with the robin's eggs blue color. For those who are curious, their taste is very similar to a chicken egg. Though these quail eggs are certainly not plovers' eggs, they always remind me of that great passage in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited when, at his room in Oxford, Sebastian Flyte treated Charles Ryder and other schoolmates to a feast that included champagne and plovers' eggs—an opulent and rare delicacy. 

"The first this year," they said. 

"Where do you get them?"

"Mummy sends them from Brideshead. 

They always lay early for her." 

When the eggs were done and we 

were eating lobster Newburg, 

the last guest arrived.

+ + +

"I’ve just counted them,” he said. 

“There were five each and two over,

 so I’m having the two. I’m 

unaccountably hungry to-day."

Oh right—mummy sends them.