186 OUR BIRD ALLIES. 
The first of these is the well-known song of the 
bird, which brings it into great request among bird- 
fanciers, and so proves a curse rather than a blessing 
to its owner. ‘To condemn a lark to life-long im- 
prisonment is perhaps a greater cruelty than to treat 
any other bird in a similar manner, for its delight in 
freedom is so great, and its exuberant exultation as it 
mounts aloft so evident, that one cannot but pity it 
intensely when deprived of all that made life pleasant 
to it, and doomed to fret away its existence within 
the bars of its narrow cage. Yet one has only to pass 
through the centres of the bird-fancying fraternity 
to realise to how great an extent this cruelty is car- 
ried on. 
The remaining cause for the persecution of the 
bird is, of course, the great demand for it as a dainty 
for the epicure’s table ; and in order to supply this 
demand, thousands upon thousands of larks are 
sometimes trapped in a single locality in a single 
day. 
Against this traffic, however, there is less to be 
said, for the birds are captured for a real, if luxurious, 
object, and are killed at once instead of being sub- 
jected to months or years of wearisome and hopeless 
imprisonment. The fact, however, remains, that 
thousands upon thousands of an useful bird are annu- 
ally killed for a practically needless purpose, and 
agriculturists injured to no little degree by the con- 
sequent loss of their services. 
EvEN in the immediate neighbourhood of a large 
