as the Sahara, and its sweet home-song of the The 

 north may be heard in Greece, by the banks Heralds 

 of the Nile, throughout Palestine even, from of March - 

 the cedars of Lebanon to the valleys about 

 Jerusalem. 



It is the skylark, however, more than any 

 other bird which so often upsets rules and 

 calculations. Even people who do not observe 

 the ways of birds must be struck by the 

 numbers of larks which may be met with in 

 the course of several midwinter walks, by the 

 occasional outbreak of brief song, even, though 

 snow be upon the wolds and a grey wind blow 

 through the sere leaves of the oak-coppice or 

 among the desolate hedgerows ; must be the 

 more struck by this, or by mention of it on 

 the part of others, when they read of the 

 hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dead larks 

 found on nights of storm or bitter frost, on 

 the rocks below lighthouses, along the great 

 lines of migration during the season of the 

 vast inscrutable ebb or of the as vast and in- 

 scrutable vernal arrival. Incalculable hosts 

 leave our shores every autumn, and along the 

 bleak fen -lands, by wave-set lighthouses, on 

 isles such as Ushant or Heligoland, thousands 

 of wings flutter and fail ; and the host passes 

 on ; and the sea -wave, the fierce gull, the 

 shore-hawk, all the tribe of the owl, all the 



