Hilary was taken into the secret, and such fun as the girls had for several weeks, looking at Catalogues and ordering, with the help of the teacher who had charge of the bird classes, books, glasses and magazines. For the idea of an East Corridor bird library had expanded into an extensive addition to the general library of the school and promised to interest not only Mr. Van Buskirk, but his friends, and outside of the scientific line in which Cathalina had begun. Mr. Van Buskirk had sent a check for a thousand dollars, five hundred of which could be spent by Cathalina, under some direction or oversight. “Let her do it,” he wrote, “if you think she can, even if she makes some mistakes. She will have to learn, and I like to see her take the initiative in some plan for others.” To Cathalina he wrote: “Keep your eyes open. I am prepared to make quite a contribution to the Greycliff library when we understand its needs.” If Greycliff had been beautiful in autumn, it was doubly so now, as the leaves came out and blossoms decked the outlying meadows. In the wood, the girls found blue, white and yellow violets. From her window Cathalina could see the birds flitting about the branches near by and hear the new and lovely spring songs that came from their happy throats, “Why,” she exclaimed to Hilary one day after a long tramp when they had dropped on the beach to rest with a group of girls. “I always loved to look at the trees and sky and water, but it does make it so much more fascinating if you go after something.” “Yes,” assented Hilary. “Now, when I see a bird on the shore I wonder if it is a duck or a coot or a gull,”—“Or a chicken!” finished Isabel, who continued with a tale of her own. “The other day I identified the janitor’s old hen as a grouse! O, yes, I can identify _any_ old thing! I put down every line and mark I could see,—in my note book, and never knew any better till it came beating it toward me and clucking! And I watched ten minutes for one of his old barnyard ducks to come around the corner of a rock. What business it had down on the shore posing as a gull or something I could not see.” “I did worse than that,” said Hilary. “Honestly, girls, I hardly knew a bluejay from a wren until this spring. So the first week of class I was trying to get as big a list as possible,”—here several girls looked interested and nodded their heads as if to say in girls’ parlance, “me, too!”