d emphatic cessation seemed to indicate that he was in a
petulant mood, perhaps impatient with the intruder, or angry with a
rival songster.

Afterwards I heard him--or, rather, one of his brothers--sing arias so
surpassingly sweet that I voted him the master minstrel of the western
plains, prairies, and meadows. One evening as I was returning to
Colorado Springs from a long tramp through one of the canyons of the
mountains, a western meadow-lark sat on a small tree and sang six
different tunes within the space of a few minutes. Two of them were so
exquisite and unique that I involuntarily sprang to my feet with a cry
of delight. There he sat in the lengthening shadows of Cheyenne
Mountain, the champion phrase-fluter of the irrigated meadow in which he
and a number of his comrades had found a summer home.

On the plain, at the time of my visit, the meadow-larks were not quite
so tuneful, for here the seasons are somewhat earlier than in the
proximity of the mountains, and the time of courtship and incubation was
over. Still, they sang enough to prove themselves members of a gifted
musical family. Observers in the East will remember the sputtering call
of the eastern larks when they are alarmed or their suspicions are
aroused. The western larks do not utter alarums of that kind, but a
harsh "chack" instead, very similar to the call of the grackles. The
nesting habits of the eastern and western species are the same, their
domiciles being placed on the ground amid the grass, often prettily
arched over in the rear and made snug and neat.

It must not be thought, because my monograph on the western larks is
included in this chapter, that they dwell exclusively on the arid plain.
No; they revel likewise in the areas of verdure bordering the streams,
in the irrigated fields and meadows, and in the watered portions of the
upper mountain parks.

An interesting question is the following: Are the eastern and western
meadow-larks distinct species, or only varieties somewhat specialized by
differences of locality and environment? It is a problem over which the
scientific professors have had not a little disputation. My own opinion
is that they are distinct species and do not cohabit, and the conviction
is based on some special investigations, though not of the kind that are
made with the birds in hand. It has been my privilege to study both
forms in the field. In the first place, their vocal exhibitions are very
different, so mu