his way along the
road he had heard a skylark. He was not dreaming; he knew it was a
skylark, though he had not heard one since he had left the banks of
the Doon, a quarter of a century or more before. What pleasure it gave
him! How much more the song meant to him than it would have meant to
me! For the moment he was on his native heath again. Then I told him
about the larks I had liberated, and he seemed to enjoy it all over
again with renewed appreciation.

Many years ago some skylarks were liberated on Long Island, and they
became established there, and may now occasionally be heard in certain
localities. One summer day a friend of mine was out there observing
them; a lark was soaring and singing in the sky above him. An old
Irishman came along, and suddenly stopped as if transfixed to the
spot; a look of mingled delight and incredulity came into his face.
Was he indeed hearing the bird of his youth? He took off his hat,
turned his face skyward, and with moving lips and streaming eyes stood
a long time regarding the bird. "Ah," my friend thought, "if I could
only hear that song with his ears!" How it brought back his youth and
all those long-gone days on his native hills!

The power of bird-songs over us is so much a matter of association
that every traveler to other countries finds the feathered songsters
of less merit than those he left behind. The stranger does not hear
the birds in the same receptive, uncritical frame of mind as does the
native; they are not in the same way the voices of the place and the
season. What music can there be in that long, piercing, far-heard note
of the first meadowlark in spring to any but a native, or in the
"o-ka-lee" of the red-shouldered starling as he rests upon the willows
in March? A stranger would probably recognize melody and a wild woodsy
quality in the flutings of the veery thrush; but how much more they
would mean to him after he had spent many successive Junes threading
our northern trout-streams and encamping on their banks! The veery
will come early in the morning, and again at sundown, and perch above
your tent, and blow his soft, reverberant note for many minutes at a
time. The strain repeats the echoes of the limpid stream in the halls
and corridors of the leafy woods.

While in England in 1882, I rushed about two or three counties in late
June and early July, bent on hearing the song of the nightingale, but
missed it by a few days, and in some cases, as it seeme