It is the skylark, however, more than any other bird which so often upsets rules and calculations. Even people who do not observe the ways of birds must be struck by the numbers of larks which may be met with in the course of several midwinter walks, by the occasional outbreak of brief song, even, though snow be upon the wolds and a grey wind blow through the sere leaves of the oak-coppice or among the desolate hedgerows; must be the more struck by this, or by mention of it on the part of others, when they read of the hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dead larks found on nights of storm or bitter frost, on the rocks below lighthouses, along the great lines of migration during the season of the vast inscrutable ebb or of the as vast and inscrutable vernal arrival. Incalculable hosts leave our shores every autumn, and along the bleak fen-lands, by wave-set lighthouses, on isles such as Ushant or Heligoland, thousands of wings flutter and fail; and the host passes on; and the sea-wave, the fierce gull, the shore-hawk, all the tribe of the owl, all the innumerable foes which prey upon the helpless, give scant grace to the weaklings and the baffled and weary. But why should all this immense congregation have listened to the ancestral cry, and from meadow and moor and the illimitable dim-sea of the fallowlands come singly and in flocks and in immense herds and in a cloudlike multitude, as sheep at the cry of the herdsman, as hounds at the long ululation of a horn, while thousands of their clan remain deaf to the mysterious Voice, the imperative silent mandate from oversea? Of these, again, countless numbers merely move to another region, and mayhap some cross the salt straits only to return; or as many, it may be, leave not at all the familiar solitudes, and at most show by cloudy flights and wild and fluctuating gyrations the heritage of blind instinct, which, if it cannot be satiated by far pilgrimage, must at least shake these troubled hearts with sudden inexplicable restlessness. It is calculated, again, that myriads of skylarks merely use our coasts as highways on their journey from the far south to the far north ... in this, too, exemplifying another strange law or manifestation of the mystery of migration, that the birds which move furthest north in their vernal arrival are those which penetrate furthest south when they turn again upon the autumnal wind of exile. Naturalists have proved, however, that countless hordes of skylarks actually arrive from Northern Europe to winter in our country. Are these birds moved by a different instinct from that which impels the majority of their kind? Have they, through generations following one another in the path of an accident, forgotten the sunlands of the common ancestral remembrance, and, having found Britain less snowbound and frostbound than the wastes of Esthonia and Pomerania, been content, when driven before the icy east wind, to fare no further than our bleak, and yet, save in the