Mr. Cooper, speaking of the bird as he found it near San Francisco, says that they begin to appear in October, when “they are usually timid, but toward spring come more familiarly around houses and utter their shrill, low notes, which seem much more distant than the bird itself really is. If pursued they hide, and sit unmovable among the foliage.” The bird is also known by several other names, such as the Spotted, Golden, Painted or Columbia Robin or Thrush, and sometimes it is called the Thrush-like Mockingbird. A marked characteristic of the male is the black crescent on the breast. Mr. Davie describes the nest as found by Dr. Minor in Alaska: “Its base and periphery are composed of an elaborate basket-work of slender twigs. Within these is an inner nest consisting of an interweaving of fine dry grasses and long gray lichen.” The eggs are said to be a light greenish-blue, slightly sprinkled with spots of a dark umber-brown. MISSOURI SKYLARK. (_Anthus spragueii._) “What thou art we know not What is most like thee? From rainbow clouds there flow not Drops so bright to see, As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.” —Shelley. When the umber skylark is struck into glory of plume and of song by the rising sun, we can conceive that the song is indeed “the nearest approach, in animal nature, to the ringing of the hydrogen bells in the physics of light,” and that when “the music soars within the little lark and the lark soars,” he is almost an involuntary agent, the song, like the summer, owing its creation, as George MacDonald tells, to “The sun that rises early, Shining, shining all day rarely; Drawing up the larks to meet him, Earth’s bird-angels, wild to greet him.”