or in places little frequented. It is made of dry
grass and moss, and lined with fibrous roots and a little horse hair.
The eggs, usually four or five in number, are dull white, spotted,
clouded, and blotched over the entire surface with brownish green.
The female Lark, says Dixon, like all ground birds, is a very close
sitter, remaining faithful to her charge. She regains her nest by
dropping to the ground a hundred yards or more from its concealment.

The food of the Lark is varied,--in spring and summer, insects and
their larvae, and worms and slugs, in autumn and winter, seeds.

Olive Thorne Miller tells this pretty anecdote of a Skylark which
she emancipated from a bird store: "I bought the skylark, though I
did not want him. I spared no pains to make the stranger happy. I
procured a beautiful sod of uncut fresh grass, of which he at once took
possession, crouching or sitting low among the stems, and looking most
bewitching. He seemed contented, and uttered no more that appealing
cry, but he did not show much intelligence. His cage had a broad base
behind which he delighted to hide, and for hours as I sat in the room
I could see nothing of him, although I would hear him stirring about.
If I rose from my seat he was instantly on the alert, and stretched
his head up to look over at me. I tried to get a better view of him by
hanging a small mirror at an angle over his cage, but he was so much
frightened by it that I removed it."

"This bird," Mrs. Miller says "never seemed to know enough to go home.
Even when very hungry he would stand before his wide open door, where
one step would take him into his beloved grass thicket, and yet that
one step he would not take. When his hunger became intolerable he ran
around the room, circled about his cage, looking in, recognizing his
food dishes, and trying eagerly to get between the wires to reach
them; and yet when he came before the open door he would stand and
gaze, but never go in. After five months' trial, during which he
displayed no particular intelligence, and never learned to enter his
cage, he passed out of the bird room, but not into a store."

[Illustration: From col. F. M. Woodruff.
WILSON'S PHALAROPE.]

WILSON'S PHALAROPE.

Perhaps the most interesting, as it is certainly the most uncommon,
characteristic of this species of birds is that the male relieves
his mate from all domestic duties except the laying of the eggs. He
usually ch