51 weeks in Palm Beach) and demands that Horton should return it, without offering him a reward. However, when the egg hatches, the creature that emerges is an "elephant-bird", a cross between Horton and Mayzie, and Horton and the baby are returned happily to the jungle, while Mayzie is punished for her laziness by ending up with absolutely nothing. Background According to Geisel's biographers Judith and Neil Morgan, Horton Hatches the Egg was born in 1940, the day after New Year's, when he took a break from drawing in his Park Avenue apartment and went for a walk. When he returned, he noticed that he had left a window open in his studio and that the wind had blown one sketch on transparent paper on top of another, making it look like an elephant was sitting in a tree. This account was based on interviews with Geisel, who had told similar stories about the book's creation to reporters asking about his creative process since as early as 1957. The story had changed with each telling but always involved the fortuitous juxtaposition of drawings of an elephant and a tree. Charles Cohen, on the other hand, found traces of Horton Hatches the Egg in early Dr. Seuss works. In an early installment of Geisel's cartoon feature "Boids and the Beasties", which began in Judge magazine in 1927, he juxtaposed a bird and an elephant. A few weeks later, he drew a story in which a whale ends up passed out in a catalpa tree. In 1938, two years before Horton Hatches the Egg, Judge published perhaps the most obvious precursor to Horton, "Matilda, the Elephant with a Mother Complex", a short story by Geisel about an "old maid elephant" who sits on a chickadee egg until it hatches, only to have the newborn chickadee fly away from her. In 1939, Geisel created an advertisement for NBC featuring a sympathetic-looking elephant lashed with ropes and contained in a cage made of sticks, similar to Horton's situation when the hunters capture him in Horton Hatches the Egg. In early drafts, the elephant's name changed from Osmer to Bosco to Humphrey. The final choice, Horton, was apparently after Horton Conrad, one of Geisel's classmates at Dartmouth College. The bird's name changed from Bessie to Saidie and finally Mayzie. In the first draft, the elephant character volunteered to sit on the eggs for the bird,