One grand flight I did see from beginning to end, and it was wonderful, amazing, astounding. So I thought, at all events. There was no telling, of course, what altitude the bird reached, but it might have been miles, so far as the effect upon the beholder’s emotions was concerned. It seemed as if the fellow never would be done. “Higher still, and higher.” Again and again this line of Shelley came to my lips, as, after every bar of music, the bird pushed nearer and nearer to the sky. At last he came down; and this, my friend and I always agreed, was the most exciting moment of all. He closed his wings and literally shot to the ground head first, like an arrow. “Wonderful!” said I, “wonderful!” And the other man said: “If I could do that I would never do anything else.” Here my story might properly enough end. The nest of which we had talked was not discovered. My own beating over of the fields came to nothing, and my companion, as if unwilling to deprive me of a possible honor, contented himself with telling me that I was looking in the wrong place. Perhaps I was. It is easy to criticise. For a minute, indeed, one of the farm-hands excited our hopes. He had found a nest which might be the lark’s, he thought; it was on the ground, at any rate; but his description of the eggs put an end to any such possibility, and when he led us to the nest it turned out to be occupied by a hermit thrush. Near it he showed us a grouse sitting upon her eggs under a roadside fence. It was while repairing the fence that he had made his discoveries. He had an eye for birds. “Those little humming-birds,” he remarked, “_they_’re quite an animal.” And he was an observer of human nature as well. “That fellow,” he said, speaking of a young man who was perhaps rather good-natured than enterprising, “that fellow don’t do enough to break the Sabbath.”