Than this a better drying-green cannot be found. On one side of the bay a long stretch of flat rocks runs down from the grass to the sea, and they too are utilized, when tides allow, to dry the seaweed. Here, in May and June, the whole air tingles with the song of larks innumerable. Long before sunrise, before the last stars have faded in the west, they are up, weaving a magical garment of song over all the green land. All day and far into the dim twilight that is our northern night they sing without ceasing. Larks are everywhere. In that tuft of grass at our feet is a nest with four of the dusky-brown eggs which hold next year’s music. There, in the ditch by the roadside, is another nest, from which the featherless young raise feeble necks to gape for food, showing their yellow tongues with the three black spots, which children here are told will appear on the tongue of that child who takes the laverock’s nest. Again, a fledgeling, speckled like a toad, rises suddenly from the clover and flies a few yards, while its anxious parents circle close overhead with little tremulous bursts of song, or flutter with trailing wing along the grass. That pretence of a broken wing, which now seems to be an instinct, must surely at first have been arrived at by a process of reasoning. There must have been long since a broken wing, and a boy, or a dog, or a snake to chase the fluttering sufferer, and some wise observer among the mother-birds of that forgotten day to see and make a note of the chase, and with the heart-leap of a happy inspiration to find in it a new method of protecting her eggs and tender young, and to hand down the lesson she learned to our blithesome bird of the wilderness. But this summer world, so thrilled with lark music, is not held by the lark alone in fee. From every dry-stone wall young starlings are calling, “Chirr! chirr! chirr!” and the old birds hurry to and fro between their nests and the brown fields, soon to wave with oats and bere, where they gather the insects and grubs their younglings love. Their bronze feathers gleam in the sunshine as they pass, and at their harsh note of warning as they see strangers near their homes the tumult of the young birds among the stones is instantly hushed. The farmer owes these cheerful and busy birds a heavy debt of gratitude, as the number of his insect enemies which they destroy is incalculable.