A month or two hence, the plover, as shy in his Northern haunts as the lark, will, in three species, be as much at home upon the lawn. Youth and inexperience must, as in the case of the other birds, be one explanation of this unwonted familiarity. Among other reasons is the abundance of food, under a mild sky, with but rare frosts to bind the earth and no snows to cover it. The temperature of an average winter day is 60 deg. or 65 deg.. A norther is apt to blow three or four times in the season, and it brings the mercury down to freezing-point or some degrees lower. After the two or three days of its duration, the first warm morning covers the walks and most other bare parts of the soil with worm-casts,--revealing the larders of the smaller birds. At an average, too, of four or five places in an acre one notices a hillock two or three feet in diameter tipped with a yellowish spot that deepens into orange and broadens as the air grows warm. These erections are the work of ants, the emergence of which intelligent insects in greater or less numbers, according to the temperature, causes the coloring which we observe. Intelligent we cannot help terming a creature so remarkable in its various species for the evidences of calculation furnished by its habits of life,--evidences nowhere better worth studying than among the leaf-cutting, slave-holding, and shade-planting ants of Texas; but we are sometimes tempted to deny the character to this particular species when we perceive the utter indifference to safety with which it selects a site for its communistic abode. One of these is located in the middle of the principal (sandy and unpaved) street of a village, within twenty steps of the railroad-track, and subject to the impact of wheels and mule-, ox-, or horse-hoof many times an hour; yet the semblance of a dwelling is maintained, and the little tawny cloud comes up smiling whenever the sun allows, asking no other permission. These ant-hills, I am persuaded, supply a foundation to certain tufts of low trees which spring up in dampish places where the spring fires have less sweep. The hillocks are well drained, as appears from their composition of clear gravel, a material of which you will find more in one of them than on a surface of many feet around; and you may see the sweeter grasses gradually mantling them, these being followed by herbage of larger growth, which, accumulating humors at their roots, bourgeon into arborescence, until, one vegetable entity shouldered into substance and thrift by another, the nucleus built by our tiny red friends has broadened into a tree-clad knoll. The mezquit, not many years ago confined for the most part to the arid region beyond the Nueces, is spreading eastward, and the clumps of it which begin to skirt the original copses here may be supposed to owe their first foothold to the ant. This humble promoter of forestry is duly appreciated, if only as a viand, by his neighbors.