In the grass or crouched down close to the brown earth and gray weed stems we see another of our friends. With a “chip” he jumps up out of the grass and is away before you can see what particular shade of gray or brown is most conspicuous. However, he doesn’t fly far, but suddenly drops into some inviting tuft, spreading out his tail like a fan as he does so, as if on purpose to show you its margin of white. This is the only one of our common sparrows that shows the white feather—the vesper sparrow, or bay-winged bunting. The field sparrow, as one authority says, had better be called the tree sparrow, because of his marked fondness for bushes and shrubs, but both of the former’s names fit; he is rightly called the vesper sparrow from his delightful custom of singing his choicest hymns to the dying sun, and bay-winged bunting from the conspicuous patch of bay or rufous on the lesser wing coverts. Sometimes in company with the vespers we see the slate-colored junco, or snow bird; at other times a gorgeous, distinguished looking sparrow, named from his partiality to these broad, low fields, the savanna sparrow. He is the dandy of this winter resort. His plaid coat and striped shirt eclipse the somber colors of all his cousins. The epaulettes of gold on his shoulders indicate his high rank; but for all that he is no dude, for he works as hard as anybody to find his own breakfast and enjoys it all the more that he eats his crickets in the sweat of his brow. A simple “chip” is the only remark he makes to us or to his companions as he runs along the cotton rows in quest of food. Ornithologists, however, tell us that up in Canada in his summer home he sings a weak, grasshopper-like song in marked contrast to the musical efforts of his neutral tinted cousin, the vesper. The fields of broom sedge are the favorite haunts of one of the birds whose cheerful music and winning ways help to make June in the North “the high tide of the year, when all of life that has ebbed away comes rippling back into each inlet and creek and bay.” I never see the meadow lark or hear his cheery whistle that I do not smell the blossoming clover and hear the ringing “spink, spank, spink” of the bobolink or catch the subtle suggestion of strawberries that comes floating to my nostrils on the warm June breeze. In a thirty minutes’ walk through the sedge I have flushed as many as two or three hundred of these birds. They are called “field larks” by the negroes, who regard them as legitimate game. The lark’s whistle—it can hardly be called a song—contains a bit of good advice habitually disregarded by the negroes. They interpret it as “laziness will kill you.”