266 GRAY LADY AND THE BIRDS 
across the table, his usual admiration for her now tinged 
with new respect. 
“T didn’t,” she signalled back, not speaking audibly, 
but making the words with her lips. “I just told 
grandma how much money we had, and she worded it; 
they always talked reports that way at the missionary 
meetings and sewing societies when she was a girl, and 
she thinks folks are getting to be real slack talkers now.”’ 
“A dis—cussion is now in order as to the spending 
of the money. Will Mr. Todd collect the papers and 
the vice-president kindly read them?” said Goldilocks, 
after looking at her paper again. And as Tommy passed 
a little box for the slips, Gray Lady came from the 
corner, So eager was she to hear what the children had 
in view. 
Rose Wilde opened the papers, and the ideas on the 
first few, though good, presented nothing original: food 
for birds; books for the school; bird charts for the 
Bridgeton Hospital. Sarah’s paper suggested sleigh- 
rides and charts for the children in the Bridgeton Orphan 
Asylum, “because they don’t know any birds but English 
Sparrows.” 
Tommy’s paper read: — “To fix the spring that used 
to come down Sugar Loaf Hill into a trough, before Bill 
Evans got mad with the Selectmen, and blocked it from 
coming through his pasture. There’s no water for drivers 
along the road above the Centre until you get to Beaver 
Brook, and that’s four miles, unless they get it from our 
well, which isn’t handy. My father could fix a big 
stone trough, ’cause he’s a mason, and birds and dogs 
and horses could drink. Birds need water to mix mud 
