Surprise
The two halves open to reveal a gold yolk with a matte finish, containing a varicolored gold hen with ruby eyes. The hen is hinged on the tail feathers which allows it to also open up to reveal two additional surprises which are now missing. The first of these was a gold and diamond replica of the imperial crown. Suspended within the crown as the final surprise was a tiny ruby pendant. A necklace chain was included so the Tsarina could wear the pendant.
Read more about this topic: First Hen Egg
Famous quotes containing the word surprise:
“The legend of Felix is ended, the toiling of Felix is done;
The Master has paid him his wages, the goal of his journey is won;
He rests, but he never is idle; a thousand years pass like a day,
In the glad surprise of Paradise where work is sweeter than play.”
—Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933)
“Extreme patience and persistence are required,
Yet everybody succeeds at this before being handed
The surprise box lunch of the rest of his life.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Our books are false by being fragmentary: their sentences are bon mots, and not parts of natural discourse; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to their petulance, or aversion from the order of nature,—being some curiosity or oddity, designedly not in harmony with nature, and purposely framed to excite surprise, as jugglers do by concealing their means.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)