Harry's Ladder to Learning

"[With Two Hundred Thirty Illustrations"

  While I was amusing myself by watching the titmice, Harry, who had rambled on a little way, came running back to ask me what the funny thing could be that he had found. It was a mole that had been caught in a trap, and was dangling in the air with a swarm of bees around. I told Harry that the moles are blind, or nearly so, and that they live under the ground, and do great good to the farmers by eating the slugs and other things that destroy the corn; but that they turn up such great mounds of earth when making their tunnels, that the farmers are often glad to get rid of them, and therefore set traps to kill them.

  In the next field we came to, the young wheat had grown up higher than my knees, and Harry was greatly pleased at running down the furrows and making the blades of corn bend before him. Presently he stopped and peeped through an opening, whence he discovered a whole covey of partridges, the two old birds and seven young ones; they all rose with a whirring noise, and flew into the field we had just left.

  Soon after the partridges had flown away, Harry was delighted to hear the well-known voice of the cuckoo; it sounded so near us that we both started at the first voice, and we soon found out where the cuckoo was. Like a lazy tyrant, instead of making a house for himself, the cuckoo takes the first little bird's nest he can find, and turns the poor occupant away. When we reached the tree where the cuckoo was, we saw it sitting on a small nest throwing out the eggs of a poor little bird, who was screaming in anger at the intruder...