To come upon an article in the Times called “The Meaning of Brown Eggs” was an unexpected pleasure. To find that it was by an Englishman, J. B. Priestley, gave it an extra fillip. And to happen on it while returning from the barn carrying the day’s catch of nine brown eggs seemed almost too pat.

Why is it, do you suppose, that an Englishman is unhappy until he has explained America? Mr. Priestley finds the key to this country in its preference for white eggs—a discovery, he says, that will move him into the “vast invisible realm where our lives are shaped.” It’s a great idea, but one seldom meets an American who is all tensed up because he has yet to explain England.

Mr. Priestley writes that “the weakness of American civilization . . . is that it is so curiously abstract.” In America, he says, “brown eggs are despised, sold off cheaply, perhaps sometimes thrown away.” Well, now. In New England, where I live and which is part of America, the brown egg, far from being despised, is king. The Boston market is a brown-egg market. I note in my morning paper, in the Boston produce report, that a dozen large white eggs yesterday brought the jobber forty-two cents, whereas a dozen large brown eggs fetched forty-five cents. Despised? Sold off cheaply? The brown egg beat the white egg by three cents.

“The Americans, well outside the ghettos,” writes Mr. Priestley, “despise brown eggs just because they do seem closer to nature. White eggs are much better, especially if they are to be given to precious children, because their very whiteness suggests hygiene and purity.” My goodness. Granting that an Englishman is entitled to his reflective moments, and being myself well outside the ghettos, I suspect there is a more plausible explanation for the popularity of the white egg in America. I ascribe the whole business to a busy little female—the White Leghorn hen. She is nervous, she is flighty, she is the greatest egg-machine on two legs, and it just happens that she lays a white egg. She’s never too distracted to do her job. A Leghorn hen, if she were on her way to a fire, would pause long enough to lay an egg. This endears her to the poultrymen of America, who are out to produce the greatest number of eggs for the least money paid out for feed. Result: much of America, apart from New England, is flooded with white eggs.

When a housewife, in New York or in Florida, comes home from market with a dozen eggs and opens her package, she finds twelve pure white eggs. This, to her, is not only what an egg should be, it is what an egg is. An egg is a white object. If this same housewife were to stray into New England and encounter a brown egg from the store, the egg would look somehow incorrect, wrong. It would look like something laid by a bird that didn’t know what it was about. To a New Englander, the opposite is true. Brought up as we are on the familiar beauty of a richly colored brown egg (gift of a Rhode Island Red or a Barred Plymouth Rock or a New Hampshire) when we visit New York and open a carton of chalk-white eggs, we are momentarily startled. Something is awry. The hen has missed fire. The eggs are white, therefore wrong.

“The English prefer the brown egg,” writes Mr. Priestley, “because it belongs to the enduring dream of the English, who always hope sooner or later to move into the country.” Here I understand what he’s talking about: the brown egg is, indeed, because of its pigmentation, more suggestive of country living—a more “natural” egg, if you wish, although there is no such thing as an unnatural egg. (My geese lay white eggs, and God knows they are natural enough.) But I find the brown egg esthetically satisfying. For most of my life I have kept hens, brooded chicks, and raised eggs for my own use. I buy chicks from a hatchery in Connecticut; by experimenting, I have found that the most beautiful brown egg of all is the egg of the Silver Cross, a bird arrived at by mating a Rhode Island Red with a White Plymouth Rock. Her egg is so richly brown, so wondrously beautiful as to defy description. Every fall, when the first pullet egg turns up on the range, I bring it into the living room and enshrine it in a black duckshead pottery ashtray, where it remains until Halloween, a symbol of fertility, admired by all. Then I take it outdoors and, in Mr. Priestley’s memorable phrase, I throw it away.

A neighbor of mine, a couple of miles up the road, is planning to go the brown egg one better. He dreams of a green egg. And what’s more, he knows of a hen who will lay one.