y out of earshot.

"Oh, I know now," said Oscar. "I've read of the lapwing; it is a bird
so devoted to its young, or its nest, that when it fancies either in
danger, it assumes all the distress of a wounded thing, and,
fluttering along the ground, draws the sportsman away from the
locality."

"Right out of a book, Oscar!" cried Sandy. "And here's its nest, as
sure as I'm alive!" So saying, the lad stooped, and, parting the grass
with his hands, disclosed a pretty nest sunk in the ground, holding
five finely speckled eggs. The bird, so lately playing the cripple,
cried and circled around the heads of the boys as they peered into the
home of the lapwing.

"Well, here's an actual settler that we must disturb, Sandy," said
Oscar; "for the plough will smash right through this nest on the very
next turn. Suppose we take it up and put it somewhere else, out of
harm's way?"

"I'm willing," assented Sandy; and the two boys, carefully extracting
the nest from its place, carried it well over into the ploughed
ground, where under the lee of a thick turf it was left in safety.
But, as might have been expected, the parent lapwing never went near
that nest again. The fright had been too great.

"What in the world are you two boys up to now?" shouted Uncle Aleck
from the other side of the ploughing. "Do you call that dropping corn?
Hurry and catch up with the team; you are 'way behind."

"Great Scott!" cried Sandy; "I had clean forgotten the corn-dropping.
A nice pair of farmers we are, Oscar!" and the lad, with might and
main, began to close rapidly the long gap between him and the steadily
moving ox-team.

"Leg-weary work, isn't it, Sandy?" said his father, when they stopped
at noon to take the luncheon they had brought out into the field with
them.

"Yes, and I'm terribly hungry," returned the boy, biting into a huge
piece of cold corn-bread. "I shouldn't eat this if I were at home, and
I shouldn't eat it now if I weren't as hungry as a bear. Say, daddy,
you cannot think how tired my leg is with the punching of that dibble
into the sod; seems as if I couldn't hold out till sundown; but I
suppose I shall. First, I punch a hole by jamming down the dibble with
my foot, and then I kick the hole again with the same foot, after I
have dropped in the grains of corn. These two motions are dreadfully
tiresome."

"Yes," said his uncle, with a short laugh, "and while I was watching
you and Oscar, this forenoon, I couldn't help thi