ld cry, "I see him yet!" "I see him yet!" "I see
him yet!" as he soared. And finally only one of us would be left to
claim that he still saw him. At last he, too, would have to admit
that the singer had soared beyond his sight, and still the music came
pouring down to us in glorious profusion, from a height far above our
vision, requiring marvelous power of wing and marvelous power of
voice, for that rich, delicious, soft, and yet clear music was
distinctly heard long after the bird was out of sight. Then, suddenly
ceasing, the glorious singer would appear, falling like a bolt
straight down to his nest, where his mate was sitting on the eggs.

It was far too common a practice among us to carry off a young lark
just before it could fly, place it in a cage, and fondly, laboriously
feed it. Sometimes we succeeded in keeping one alive for a year or
two, and when awakened by the spring weather it was pitiful to see the
quivering imprisoned soarer of the heavens rapidly beating its wings
and singing as though it were flying and hovering in the air like its
parents. To keep it in health we were taught that we must supply it
with a sod of grass the size of the bottom of the cage, to make the
poor bird feel as though it were at home on its native meadow,--a
meadow perhaps a foot or at most two feet square. Again and again it
would try to hover over that miniature meadow from its miniature sky
just underneath the top of the cage. At last, conscience-stricken, we
carried the beloved prisoner to the meadow west of Dunbar where it was
born, and, blessing its sweet heart, bravely set it free, and our
exceeding great reward was to see it fly and sing in the sky.

In the winter, when there was but little doing in the fields, we
organized running-matches. A dozen or so of us would start out on
races that were simply tests of endurance, running on and on along a
public road over the breezy hills like hounds, without stopping or
getting tired. The only serious trouble we ever felt in these long
races was an occasional stitch in our sides. One of the boys started
the story that sucking raw eggs was a sure cure for the stitches. We
had hens in our back yard, and on the next Saturday we managed to
swallow a couple of eggs apiece, a disgusting job, but we would do
almost anything to mend our speed, and as soon as we could get away
after taking the cure we set out on a ten or twenty mile run to prove
its worth. We thought nothing of running r