Then questions flew so thick and fast that Gray Lady could not even hear herself think, and presently, when every one had laughed at the confusion, order was restored.
“I asked you a moment ago what you would like to hear about. I think I know. You would like to hear about birds! Are there any other boys here besides Tommy and Dave who care about birds?” asked Gray Lady, who wished to have each child feel that he or she had a part in what was going on.
“I know about birds’ eggs!” cried Bobby Bates, a boy who, from being undersized, looked much younger than he really was; “I’ve got a pint fruit-jar of robins’ eggs.”
“But I’ve got a quart jar of mixed eggs,” said Dave, “and they’re mostly little ones, Wrens and Chippy birds and such like, so’s I’ve really got more’n Bobby!” he added boastfully.
Gray Lady opened her lips to speak sharply and her eyes flashed, for nest-robbing was one of the things she most detested. Then she remembered that perhaps these children had not only never even dreamed that there was any harm in it, but had never heard of the laws that wise people had made to protect the eggs of wild birds, as well as the birds themselves, from harm. So she hesitated a moment while she thought how she might best make the matter understood.
“Why do you like to collect eggs?” she asked. “Because they are pretty?”
“Yes’m, partly,” drawled Dave, “and then to see how many I can get in a spring.”
“But do you never think how you worry the mother birds by stealing their eggs, and how many more birds there would be if you let the eggs hatch out? What the rhyme says is true,—
“ ‘The blue eggs in the Robin’s nest
Will soon have beak and wings and breast,