The ostrich is a most interesting citizen of the desert that I didn't have room to talk about. There's enough for a whole chapter in your notebook just about ostriches and their ways. Among other things, I wish you'd find out for me if the ostrich really does bury its head in the sand and imagine that it is thereby hiding itself. (I'll warrant you it's only book ostriches that do this; not real ostriches.) One of the most curious things about Mrs. Ostrich is how she and her neighbors work together. It's like an old-fashioned quilting bee, for all the world; although, to be sure, the ostriches don't make quilts--they make nests.[36] [Footnote 36: "Romance of Animal Arts and Crafts."] Speaking of ostrich nests naturally suggests eggs--and very big eggs, of course, including the roc's egg in the "Arabian Nights." They do have real rock's eggs in the desert, only this kind of a roc's egg is spelled with a "k." You just turn to the chapter on deserts in Hobb's "Face of the Earth," and you'll find not only that there are such eggs, but how the desert sun uses salt in cooking them and what the crystal people have to do with it; and how, like a cat in a hen-house, the desert winds suck these eggs, leaving only the hollow shell. CHAPTER IX (SEPTEMBER) Morning The summer dawn's reflected hue To purple changed Loch Katrine blue. --_Scott_: "_Lady of the Lake_." Evening Now folds the lily all her sweetness up And slips into the bosom of the lake. --_Tennyson_: "_The Princess_." IN THE LANDS OF THE LAKES If we really had spent the month of August in a desert what a relief it would be to find ourselves, as we do now at the very beginning of the golden autumn time, in the lands of the lakes with their cool, fresh breezes, the whisper of leaves and the glint of waters dancing in the sun. The best of it is that the deserts are just as delightful as the lands of pleasant waters, if you only visit them in imagination as we have been doing; and they make the lakes all the more attractive by way of contrast. I. How the Lakes are Born But where are the lands of the lakes? I may say to start with, it's no use looking for many lakes in the lands of the big caves. Caves and lakes don't seem to get on together any more than do caves and boulders. When this story of the lakes was first told to a certain group of young people some of the youngest of whom had not forgotten the giants or the language of their fairy tales, I put it in this way: