Soon thirteen pens were scratching away industriously, while Eliza and Dave fingered theirs, fidgeted with the paper, and wriggled in their seats as if uncertain what to say or whether they would write at all. Finally the teacher said, “If any one of you is needed at home on Saturday or cannot for any other reason go to the party, you may write that, but each child must send a reply; and be very careful, for I shall send the notes as they are written without corrections.” Sarah Barnes was deputed to collect the papers, and after school was dismissed Miss Wilde glanced over the notes before enclosing them in one large envelope. Eliza’s read:— “I would like to go to the party but my ma says to look at birds is silly and that when folks looks much at birds they get afraid to trim their hats with them, and my ma and me has birds on our Sunday hats and they look tastie, and we don’t want to get afraid so there’s no use in my going to the party ’xcept to eat the lunch, which wouldn’t be fare.” Miss Wilde’s first impulse was to leave out this curiously worded and badly spelled letter; then, as she read it a second time she smiled and said to herself, “Who knows but what this note will give Gray Lady a good idea of the other side of the question and of the objections she will meet?” Dave’s note was no more agreeable, though expressed rather more clearly:— “I’d like to go up to your house, but when I told father bout the other day and you wanting us not to get birds’ eggs, he says he knows what some people want, and next thing will be to get me to sign that I won’t go trappin or shootin nothin, and spoiling my fun, and birds are only knuisances, except the kinds we can eat.” This note also went with the others, but by Friday morning the two children, who had heard nothing talked of for two days but the party, began to wish that they were going, Eliza especially, for her mother said that morning, “You weren’t smart to refuse; you could have had a peep inside the General’s house, maybe, and I don’t believe she’d dassed said a word about birds on hats, with one of the company wearing ’em!” On Friday afternoon, when Miss Wilde asked the children to meet her at the hedge half a mile above the schoolhouse at ten o’clock the following morning, so that they might take a short cut across the fields, she noticed that Eliza and Dave hung behind the others, who as usual raced off in different directions toward home, and then Eliza, who was walking beside her, mumbled something about “wishing she hadn’t refused and supposing that it was too late now,” etc. “Of course, it is not very polite to change one’s mind about an invitation,” said the teacher, “but Gray Lady wrote me last night that if you and Dave should feel differently about wishing to come, I might bring you, but that after to-morrow it would be too late.”