whistle to the orchestra of the mocking-bird.  This so-called lark is classed by most naturalists among the starlings, as are two of the blackbirds, which two he resembles in some of his habits, but not in migrating, being about as much of a continental as any other biped American.  Nor is he like his cousins in changes of dress.  Out of a dozen of the latter that may be brought down at a shot, you will scarcely find three exactly alike.  They moult at the South, and the young pass gradually into adult plumage.  The male redwing, up to his first autumn, is hardly distinguishable in dress from his mother.  Here he dons his epaulettes, beginning with the threadbare worsted yellow of the private, and rising in grade to the rich scarlet and gold of the officer fully commissioned to flame upon the marsh and carry havoc among its humblest inhabitants.

A month or two hence, the plover, as shy in his Northern haunts as the lark, will, in three species, be as much at home upon the lawn.  Youth and inexperience must, as in the case of the other birds, be one explanation of this unwonted familiarity.  Among other reasons is the abundance of food, under a mild sky, with but rare frosts to bind the earth and no snows to cover it.  The temperature of an average winter day is 60 deg. or 65 deg..  A norther is apt to blow three or four times in the season, and it brings the mercury down to freezing-point or some degrees lower.  After the two or three days of its duration, the first warm morning covers the walks and most other bare parts of the soil with worm-casts,—­revealing the larders of the smaller birds.  At an average, too, of four or five places in an acre one notices a hillock two or three feet in diameter tipped with a yellowish spot that deepens into orange and broadens as the air grows warm.  These erections are the work of ants, the emergence of which intelligent insects in greater or less numbers, according to the temperature, causes the coloring which we observe.  Intelligent we cannot help terming a creature so remarkable in its various species for the evidences of calculation furnished by its habits of life,—­evidences nowhere better worth studying than among the leaf-cutting, slave-holding, and shade-planting ants of Texas; but we are sometimes tempted to deny the character to this particular species when we perceive the utter indifference to safety with which it selects a site for its communistic abode.  One of these is located in the middle of the principal (sandy and unpaved) street of a village, within twenty steps of the railroad-track, and subject to the impact of wheels and mule-, ox-, or horse-hoof many times an hour; yet the semblance of a dwelling is maintained, and the little tawny cloud comes up smiling whenever the sun allows, asking no other permission.  These ant-hills, I am persuaded, supply a foundation to certain tufts of low trees which spring up in dampish places where the spring fires have less sweep.  The hillocks are well drained,