When the nesting-season is over--and maybe there were a couple of broods--the larks will club together on a picnic excursion and wander off and on, nobody knows just where. Perchance they will turn up in the next town or the next county or the next state. As they wander, they will sing plaintively, stopping for meals where meals are served. Or they will chatter all together, recognized wherever their happy lot is cast, loved by the loving, perhaps eaten by the sensual. It will be remembered that the lark was a wedding guest of no ordinary office at the marriage of Cock Robin and Jenny Wren. At the very last feature of the beautiful ceremony the ballad runs this wise: "Then on her finger fair Cock Robin put the ring, While the lark aloud did sing: 'Happy be the bridegroom, And happy be the bride; And may not man nor bird nor beast This happy pair divide.'" After the cruel blunder was done, which was the fault of neither bird nor beast nor man (by intention), and the question as to who should act the part of clerk at the last sad burial rites was raised, it was the lark who volunteered, though it is to be supposed that his heart was breaking. "Who will be the clerk? 'I,' said the lark, 'If it's not in the dark, And I will be the clerk.'" Now, why the lark should object to doing this very solemn service for his dead friend the robin, if it should happen to be "dark," we cannot tell. Perchance he really couldn't act the part of a clerk at night on account of his family having been forbidden, centuries and centuries ago, to lean any more against the moon in the first quarter. It used to be a habit of theirs to sing that way, and that is how they came by the crescent on their breast. The gods made up their minds that if all the larks in the world took to leaning their breasts against the moon all at one time it would result in toppling the old moon over. The meadow-lark being the last of the family of larks to obey the command, flew away with the shadow of the crescent under his throat. Anybody can see it for himself in plain sight. So, as intimated, the lark at the funeral, remembering that he couldn't have a moon to lean against, refused to do the part asked of him, if the ceremony occurred after dark. Though, come to think of it, this legend about the crescent must be of very recent date, for the lark of the ballad could have been no other than the English skylark, which has no crescent. But the moon has a crescent, and so has our meadow-lark, and so, if there be a grain of truth in the ballad and the legend, our dear singer must have been spirited across the sea for that special occasion. Our interest in this old ballad of Cock Robin would have died before it began had we not been informed of the whole affair with such precision as to details.