“Sea-birds must be reckoned among the chief agencies which have made many rocky or sandy islands fit for human habitation. The service performed by birds in fertilizing, soil-building, and seed-sowing on many barren islands entitles our feathered friends to the gratitude of many a shipwrecked sailor, who must else have lost his life on barren, storm-beaten shores.”
—E. H. Forbush.
“Is mine a good grown-up Gull?” asked Bobbie, who had been waiting anxiously for its safe return to his hands, “because grandpa says if it is, he’ll take it over to town, and get it stuffed, and fixed up on a perch, to remember Oyster Day by; but I’ll bury it if you’d rather I would.”
“It is a fully grown bird, Bobbie,” said Gray Lady, “and it is wearing its winter dress. In summer the head and neck that are now streaked with gray would be a dazzling white, and as accident killed it, and wind and tide gave it to you, there is no reason why you may not keep it with a clear conscience.”
XVII
THE BIRDS’ CHRISTMAS TREE
Preparation
The Christmas sale was over. It had been held in the play and work rooms the Saturday before Christmas, and was a great success. The dressed dolls, iron-holders, aprons, bird-houses, wooden spoons, racks for clothes, and little knickknacks had been ranged on the work-table and carpenter’s bench, and all the people of the neighbouring towns, as well as from Fair Meadows village itself, had been asked to come and see. When they came and saw, they stayed to buy.
The bird-houses proved the greatest novelty, and Tommy Todd and Dave, their cheeks red with excitement, were kept busy taking orders for more, to be finished by May or June, one customer said. She, however, was very much amused when Tommy told her that if she expected to have birds in the house (it was a box for Tree Swallows) the first season, she must have the house in place before April, so that it might “be weathered a little, and the birds find it when they first came, and not think it was a trap put up to catch them.”
Gray Lady donated some delicious cake of Ann’s make, and hot chocolate, and while the visitors enjoyed it, they asked many questions about the bird class, the school at Foxes Corners, and the motives of the Kind Hearts’ Club itself; for this name had been printed on the posters advertising the sale.
The result that concerned the public good was that other men and women resolved, even if they could not do it as thoroughly as Gray Lady, to supply the teachers in their various districts with charts and books, and before night settled down, Sarah Barnes, the treasurer of the Club, was hugging tight in her arms a small iron box, with a lock and key, wherein were fifty precious dollars, while orders that meant an equal sum before the close of the school year were being copied from a rather mussy paper into a blank-book, by Tommy Todd, the secretary, whose usually clear upright letters were made crooked by his excitement.