When the ploughmen met them, on the next turn of the team, Uncle Aleck said, "Did you catch the lapwing, you silly boy? That fellow fooled you nicely." "Lapwing?" said Sandy, puzzled. "What's a lapwing?" But the ploughmen were already out of earshot. "Oh, I know now," said Oscar. "I've read of the lapwing; it is a bird so devoted to its young, or its nest, that when it fancies either in danger, it assumes all the distress of a wounded thing, and, fluttering along the ground, draws the sportsman away from the locality." "Right out of a book, Oscar!" cried Sandy. "And here's its nest, as sure as I'm alive!" So saying, the lad stooped, and, parting the grass with his hands, disclosed a pretty nest sunk in the ground, holding five finely speckled eggs. The bird, so lately playing the cripple, cried and circled around the heads of the boys as they peered into the home of the lapwing. "Well, here's an actual settler that we must disturb, Sandy," said Oscar; "for the plough will smash right through this nest on the very next turn. Suppose we take it up and put it somewhere else, out of harm's way?" "I'm willing," assented Sandy; and the two boys, carefully extracting the nest from its place, carried it well over into the ploughed ground, where under the lee of a thick turf it was left in safety. But, as might have been expected, the parent lapwing never went near that nest again. The fright had been too great. "What in the world are you two boys up to now?" shouted Uncle Aleck from the other side of the ploughing. "Do you call that dropping corn? Hurry and catch up with the team; you are 'way behind." "Great Scott!" cried Sandy; "I had clean forgotten the corn-dropping. A nice pair of farmers we are, Oscar!" and the lad, with might and main, began to close rapidly the long gap between him and the steadily moving ox-team. "Leg-weary work, isn't it, Sandy?" said his father, when they stopped at noon to take the luncheon they had brought out into the field with them. "Yes, and I'm terribly hungry," returned the boy, biting into a huge piece of cold corn-bread. "I shouldn't eat this if I were at home, and I shouldn't eat it now if I weren't as hungry as a bear. Say, daddy, you cannot think how tired my leg is with the punching of that dibble into the sod; seems as if I couldn't hold out till sundown; but I suppose I shall. First, I punch a hole by jamming down the dibble with my foot, and then I kick the hole again with the same foot, after I have dropped in the grains of corn. These two motions are dreadfully tiresome." "Yes," said his uncle, with a short laugh, "and while I was watching you and Oscar, this forenoon, I couldn't help thinking that you did not yet know how to make your muscles bear an equal strain. Suppose you try changing legs?" "Changing legs?" exclaimed both boys at once. "Why, how could we exchange legs?"