Men are out on the ridge hard by catching larks with mirrors. Catching skylarks for table! Just think of the sacrilege! Listen! As I write I can hear the dear birds carolling loud even now in the divine sunshine; singing gaily at heaven’s gate, as they sang for Shakespeare; pouring their full hearts, in their joy, as they poured them forth for Shelley! And these London jailbirds, slouching figures in short jackets and round-brimmed hats, have come down from their slums to our free Surrey moors, to catch and kill them! How I hope they will fail! To the lover of nature, in spite of the proverb; a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand—or, indeed, two thousand.

At this moment, to tell you true, our meadows and pastures are just thronged with skylarks. We have always dozens of them, proclaiming their gladness every sunshiny day in rich cataracts of music. But within the last few days the dozens have turned into scores and hundreds, for it is the time of the great influx of Continental larks over sea into England. There is a difference, too, though a slight one, between our true home birds and the hungry refugees who flock here for food and warmth in winter. Our native and resident skylark is the smaller bird of the two, and more russet in colour; the migrants who join him in our winter fields are both larger and darker. Their ashy isabelline plumage, cold grey granite in hue, has less of a generous rufous tinge to relieve it than in the true-born Briton. Such minor differences, indeed, between local races of allied type occur often in nature; they are the first beginnings out of which new kinds may in time be developed by natural selection. For instance, each important river of Britain has its own breed of salmon, to be recognized at sight—so they say—by the experienced fly-fisher. Thus, again, in the matter of skylarks, our English type differs slightly in shape and hue from the Continental—just about as much as your John Bull differs from a Frenchman, or a German. As we approach the Mediterranean, a still paler and lighter form begins to take the place of the northern bird, and has been honoured (without due reason, I should think) with a separate Latin name, as a distinct species. It stands to our own ruddy-brown English skylark in something the same relation as the Moor or the Syrian stands to the Western European. This pale form, once more, straggles through Anatolia and across Central Asia; but merges in the Himalayas, Japan, and China into a russet mountain type, which is also regarded by systematic naturalists as a distinct species. The truth is, however, when you take any large area of the world together, it is impossible to draw distinct lines anywhere between one animal or plant and another. Kind melts into kind for the most part by imperceptible stages.

Even in the dreariest months our skylark still sings to us, at rarer intervals, on bright frosty mornings. He hovers over the grass when it sparkles and scintillates with crystal filigree. His music it is that so endears him to all of us. He is busy at work now, I see, in the stubble of the corn-fields, where, a useful ally of the agricultural interest, he picks out the seeds of black bindweed and corn-poppy—not unmixed, it ............