12 GRAY LADY AND THE BIRDS 
copper wire, in which it was hoped the field rats might be 
caught, that, as soon as cool weather came, gnawed their 
way in through the loose floor boards and sometimes 
destroyed the books, and, as Sarah Barnes declared (whose 
duty it was to keep the wells filled), drank the ink. 
Tommy also kept the water-pail full and tended the big 
wood stove in winter; but none of these tasks seemed to 
touch the restless spot and he could think out more puzzling 
questions in a day than the whole school board could have 
answered in a week, and then, as Sarah Barnes once said, 
“Tommy Todd’s questions never seem to stay answered.” 
Miss Wilde had taught, at first, in the school of a large 
town where there were plenty of pictures and maps on the 
walls, and charts of different kinds and reference books 
for the children to use, and where people who loved 
children would often drop in and tell them about birds 
and flowers or their journeys to interesting places. She 
had taken the country school because the doctor thought 
it would be better for her health, and oh, how she wished 
that she could have brought some of the pictures and books 
with her, or that some of the summer boarders who stayed 
until almost winter would come in and talk to her pupils. 
She told the children stories or read to them on Friday 
afternoons. She also knew that there were some travel- 
ling libraries of books that she might borrow that the 
children could have themselves, but reading is a habit ; 
the children needed to be interested first. So it came 
about that, when the second year of her school life on the 
hillside began, Miss Wilde felt rather discouraged. 
On this particular rainy Friday she was feeling worried 
about her mother, who boarded at the Centre Village 
