6 GRAY LADY AND THE BIRDS 
“Well, what happened next?’ asked grandma. “I 
wonder she didn’t tell you not to trespass and feed animals 
in a cemetery !” 
“Oh, no, she liked it, and we got acquainted right away. 
She asked me what put it in my head to bring the flowers, 
and I told her that it was because nobody else did and 
that I loved the General because my mother told me that 
though he lived through a lot of battles, he got 
the wound that made him die long after, in trying to get 
back a little black child that had been sold away from its 
mother, for it’s an awful thing to take children away from 
their mothers, and only God should do it, and I know He 
must be always sorry when He has to. And I said I knew 
how it hurt because He took my mother away from me. 
“Goldilocks said she wished that she had a tame squirrel 
down in her garden, and I said there were plenty of squir- 
rels there, and she could begin to tame ’em as soon as food 
gets scarce. Then she asked how I knew, and then it all 
came out that Dave and Tommy Todd, Mary, and I often 
take a cross-cut through the General’s orchard, when we 
go over to Aunt Jane’s. Then they asked me to walk 
down home with them. 
“There was a new high fence all round the orchard, 
with a gate by the old house in the corner that has the 
big stone chimney, where the Swallows live, so we can’t 
cut across any more, and before I thought, I said so; but 
Gray Lady said, ‘I think, Sarah, it will be quite as pleasant 
for you to come in at the front gate, and go out at the 
back, as to crawl through a hole in the brush like a fox 
or a woodchuck,’ and I guess it will, for she doesn’t want 
us to stop coming. 
