~ 
70 BRITISH BIRDS, THEIR EGGS AND NESTS. 
2. CONIROSTRES. 
FAMILY I.—ALAUDIDA. 
86. SHORE LARK.—(Alauda alpestris). 
| Only avery few of these birds have been met with in Britain 
87. SKY LARK—(Alauda arvensis). 
Lark, Field Lark, Lavrock—Very few words of description 
are requisite in the case of this everywhere familiar and favourite 
songster. Up in the sky, and soaring still, he pours out his 
joyous strains, suggesting to us much more forcibly than any 
other bird does in its song the thought that it is offering praise 
and thanks to Him who made and preserves the fowl that fly in 
the air, as well as all other creatures. So that the thought in 
the old German Hymn,— 
“Hark! Hark! the Lark at Heayen s gate sings,” 
seems not fanciful to us, but solemn truth. Once last summer 1 
was speaking the solemn words, “dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” 
over a dead parishioner, followed as they so soon are by the telling 
of our “sure and certain hope of a joyful resurrection,” when a 
Sky Lark, right over our heads, broke out into his sweet, simple, 
thankful, hopeful, joyous melody, and by it spoke to more sad 
hearts than one in that silent company. Up, up, to the sky was 
his pathway, and the song and the soaring both said that a “joyful 
resurrection” was no “ cunningly devised fable.” 
The Sky Lark’s nest is always.on the ground, often near the 
edge of a furrow, sometimes neara little grassy unevenness of 
the surface, sometimes even, cunningly concealed in a dry grassy 
erip by the side of a field at the foot of a low hedge-bank. It 
is but a slight and imartificial structure, of bents lined with finer 
grasses and a few fibrous roots. The eggs, which I never knew 
