116 GRAY LADY AND THE BIRDS 
one time or another had been through some sort of an 
experience with sticky fly-paper, and little Bobbie chuckled 
so long that Gray Lady asked him what he knew about fly- 
paper, and thus drew forth the explanation that his 
father had sat on a sheet of fly-paper in the dark best 
parlor one Sunday morning when he was waiting for the 
family to get ready to drive to church, and nobody noticed 
until he, being a deacon, got up to pass the plate! 
“What were the Crows and Jays and Blackbirds in 
the orchard doing, Tommy; did you notice?” asked Gray 
Lady, as she arranged some papers between the leaves of 
her scrap-book. 
“The Jays were hanging around your lunch-counter in 
the old apple tree, that is, most of them; some seemed to be 
bringing acorns or some sort of big seeds from the river- 
woods way, and taking them into the attic of the old 
Swallow Chimney house. I never saw so many Jays at 
once; I counted sixteen of them,” said Tommy. 
“The Crows and Grackles were walking on the ground, 
some in the grass meadow, and some in the open ploughed 
field, and they were all searching about as if they had lost 
something, and they kept picking and eating all the time.” 
“Were they eating corn that had dropped, or rye?” 
asked Gray Lady. 
“Oh, no, there wasn’t any corn there, and the rye isn’t 
sown yet. They were eating bugs and things like that, 
I guess,’”’ said Tommy, to whom a new idea had come as he 
spoke. 
“That is precisely what I hoped that one of you would 
see for yourself — the fact that both of these birds eat 
many things besides corn and grain. 
