y of a twig he had just left.

One morning, however, before I was up, the puzzling songster visited the
little grove under my windows, and I heard his whole song, of which it
now appeared the three notes were merely the conclusion. The
performance was eccentric. It began with a soft warble, apparently for
his sole entertainment, then suddenly, as if overwhelmed by memory of
wrongs received or of punishment deserved, he interrupted his tender
melody with a loud, incisive "Whip-for-her!" in a totally different
manner. His nearness, however, solved the mystery; the ring of the
meadow-lark was in his tones, and I knew him at once. I had not
suspected his identity, for the Western bird does not take much trouble
to keep out of sight, and, moreover, his song is rarely less than six or
eight notes in length.

Another unique singer of the highlands is the horned lark. One morning
in June a lively carriage party passing along the mountain side, on a
road so bare and bleak that it seemed nothing could live there, was
startled by a small gray bird, who suddenly dashed out of the sand
beside the wheels, ran across the path, and flew to a fence on the other
side. Undisturbed, perhaps even stimulated, by the clatter of two horses
and a rattling mountain wagon, undaunted by the laughing and talking
load, the little creature at once burst into song, so loud as to be
heard above the noisy procession, and so sweet that it silenced every
tongue.

"How exquisite! What is it?" we asked each other, at the end of the
little aria.

"It's the gray sand bird," answered the native driver.

"Otherwise the horned lark," added the young naturalist, from his
broncho behind the carriage.

Let not his name mislead: this pretty fellow, in soft, gray-tinted
plumage, is not deformed by "horns;" it is only two little tufts of
feathers, which give a certain piquant, wide-awake expression to his
head, that have fastened upon him a title so incongruous. The nest of
the desert-lover is a slight depression in the barren earth, nothing
more; and the eggs harmonize with their surroundings in color. The whole
is concealed by its very openness, and as hard to find, as the
bobolink's cradle in the trackless grass of the meadow.

Most persistent of all the singers of the grove beside the house was the
yellow warbler, a dainty bit of featherhood the size of one's thumb. On
the Atlantic coast his simple ditty is tender, and so low that it must
be listened for;