“Ah, well,” said he, on reflection, “we could not expect to have it all to ourselves, and indeed it would be a sin to wish it, you know.  Now, Tom, come this way; here it is, here it is—­there.”  Tom looked up, and in a gigantic cage was a light brown bird.

He was utterly confounded.  “What, is it this we came twelve miles to see?”

“Ay! and twice twelve wouldn’t have been much to me.”

“Well, but what is the lark you talked of?”

“This is it.”

“This?  This is a bird.”

“Well, and isn’t a lark a bird?”

“Oh, ay!  I see! ha! ha! ha! ha!”

Robinson’s merriment was interrupted by a harsh remonstrance from several of the diggers, who were all from the other end of the camp.

“Hold your ——­ cackle,” cried one, “he is going to sing;” and the whole party had their eyes turned with expectation toward the bird.

Like most singers, he kept them waiting a bit.  But at last, just at noon, when the mistress of the house had warranted him to sing, the little feathered exile began as it were to tune his pipes.  The savage men gathered round the cage that moment, and amid a dead stillness the bird uttered some very uncertain chirps, but after a while he seemed to revive his memories, and call his ancient cadences back him to one by one, and string them sotto voce.

And then the same sun that had warmed his little heart at home came glowing down on him here, and he gave music back for it more and more, till at last—­amid breathless silence and glistening eyes of the rough diggers hanging on his voice—­out burst in that distant land his English song.

It swelled his little throat and gushed from him with thrilling force and plenty, and every time he checked his song to think of its theme, the green meadows, the quiet stealing streams, the clover he first soared from, and the spring he sang so well, a loud sigh from many a rough bosom, many a wild and wicked heart, told how tight the listeners had held their breath to hear him; and when he swelled with song again, and poured with all his soul the green meadows, the quiet brooks, the honey clover and the English spring, the rugged mouths opened and so stayed, and the shaggy lips trembled, and more than one drop trickled from fierce unbridled hearts down bronzed and rugged cheeks.

Dulce dornurn!

And these shaggy men, full of oaths and strife and cupidity, had once been white-headed boys, and had strolled about the English fields with little sisters and little brothers, and seen the lark rise, and heard him sing this very song.  The little playmates lay in the churchyard, and they were full of oaths and drink and lusts and remorses—­but no note was changed in this immortal song.  And so for a moment or two years of vice rolled away like a dark cloud from the memory, and the past shone out in the song-shine.  They came back, bright as the immortal notes that lighted them, those faded pictures and those fleeted days; the cottage, the old mother’s tears when he left her without one grain of sorrow; the village-church and its simple chimes; the clover-field hard by in which he lay and gamboled, while the lark praised God overhead; the chubby playmates that never grew to be wicked, the sweet hours of youth—­and innocence—­and home.