To July belongs the skylark, a bird really of all the year, but most intimately somehow the genius of the meadow. The hay has been cut, the first brood of young are flown, and the larks are again building, renewing the Spring with the aftermath of grass. The glorious growth of the meadow, spangled with ox-eye daisy and corn-flower, has been laid low, and the scented harvest has been carted, and the larks are busier than ever in the smooth-shorn field, while the sky seems never so full of their song as when the hay-makers are afield. The scythe and the terrible machine, and the tramp of feet behind them, are fatal to many a brood, but the majority escape, being on the wing, or, at any rate, running with their parents safely out of danger, by the time that the mowers come. "And the glossy finches chatter Up and down, up and down, And the chaffinch idly sitteth With her mate upon the sheaves, And the wistful robin flitteth Over beds of yellow leaves." "_The Moorcock springs on whirring wings_ _Among the blooming heather._" BURNS. August is, by sad right, the month of the grouse--a month of catastrophe, for it is then in the best of its health, enjoying the best of the moor and harvest, when the fateful Twelfth comes round; and after the day is over, horrid with perpetual guns, "at the close of eve She gathers in, mournful, her brood dispersed By murderous sport, and o'er the remnant spreads Fondly her wings." It is now, too, that the ptarmigan collect into large parties, and, forsaking the highlands, wander lower in search of more varied food: unwise in their generation, for in the higher altitudes they were comparatively safe from many of the perils that beset the grouse. True, when they were up among the clouds they were in the demesnes of the eagle, who thinned their company as they fed upon the shoots of heather and ling growing in tufts among the rocks or in broad patches down some sunny slope-- "Where the grouse lead their coveys Thro' the heather to feed."