Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 14, 2025
So vivid was the impression of that long array of awed, pallid faces that at this moment I can recall them distinctly. There were strange little touches of mingled pathos and humor. Meadow-larks were hemmed in on every side, too frightened to fly far beyond the rude alarms. They would flutter up into the sulphurous air with plaintive cries, then drop again into the open spaces between the troops.
It was all true, just as the school-master had told him; the big, beautiful houses he saw now and then up avenues of blossoming locusts; the endless stone fences, the whitewashed barns, the woodlands and pastures; the meadow-larks flitting in the sunlight and singing everywhere; fluting, chattering blackbirds, and a strange new black bird with red wings, at which Chad wondered very much, as he watched it balancing itself against the wind and singing as it poised.
Out of it, the meadow-larks showed their good-luck waistcoats and rippled their tunes; out of it, countless wild roses smiled up pinkly to the sun. But all the loveliness of the new day only mocked at the lonely girls in the wagon. To them, the grey sands of their desert home, the blistering "northers," the brassy skies, were, unconsciously, synonymous of safety and peace.
We heard the rippling song of some meadow-larks this day, the only birds of this species we remember having seen on the Western plateaus. All these ranches were laid out in true Mormon style, that is, squared off in sections, fenced, and planted with shade-trees before being worked. The roads are usually wide and the streets exceptionally so.
But the snipes and plover had gone into a decline, the orioles and ovenbirds had grown thin and unkempt, and the bobolinks and meadow-larks had eaten themselves to death. Sorrowful over so much misfortune, she had longed to secure a hardy bird that would not only live in captivity, but would repay her loving care with songs. The young cowbird proved to be just what she had wanted.
There were meadow-larks and robins without as well as within, and it was no subjective plough that turned the earliest furrows in those opulent fields.
He knows well, however, when to vary his program. Once I saw him hovering at dusk over some wild land covered with bushes and dead grass, a favorite winter haunt of meadow-larks. His manner showed that he knew his game was near. He kept hovering over a certain spot, swinging off noiselessly to right or left, only to return again.
"It is always nice and dry there," he said, "for the rain runs right off the mushroom and does not touch my little cobweb home!" That night as he lay in his little thistle-down bed, Thumbkins heard it thundering. "I'm very glad that I haven't a home built right out upon the bare ground like the meadow-larks!" he said. And as the thunder grew louder, Thumbkins turned over and tried to go to sleep.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking