the
chipmunk, and I am curious to know what would have been the result had
he overtaken him. Probably it was only a kind of brag on the part of
the bird,--a bold dash where no risk was run. He simulated the hawk,
the squirrel's real enemy, and no doubt enjoyed the joke.

On another occasion, as I was riding along a mountain road early in
April, a bird started from the fence where I was passing, and flew
heavily to the branch of a near apple-tree. It proved to be a shrike
with a small bird in his beak. He thrust his victim into a fork of a
branch, then wiped his bloody beak upon the bark. A youth who was with
me, to whom I pointed out the fact, had never heard of such a thing,
and was much incensed at the shrike. "Let me fire a stone at him," said
he, and jumping out of the wagon, he pulled off his mittens and fumbled
about for a stone. Having found one to his liking, with great
earnestness and deliberation he let drive. The bird was in more danger
than I had imagined, for he escaped only by a hair's breadth; a
guiltless bird like the robin or sparrow would surely have been slain;
the missile grazed the spot where the shrike sat, and cut the ends of
his wings as he darted behind the branch. We could see that the
murdered bird had been brained, as its head hung down toward us.

The shrike is not a summer bird with us in the Northern States, but
mainly a fall and winter one; in summer he goes farther north. I see
him most frequently in November and December. I recall a morning during
the former month that was singularly clear and motionless; the air was
like a great drum. Apparently every sound within the compass of the
horizon was distinctly heard. The explosions back in the cement
quarries ten miles away smote the hollow and reverberating air like
giant fists. Just as the sun first showed his fiery brow above the
horizon, a gun was discharged over the river. On the instant a shrike,
perched on the topmost spray of a maple above the house, set up a loud,
harsh call or whistle, suggestive of certain notes of the blue jay. The
note presently became a crude, broken warble. Even this scalper of the
innocents had music in his soul on such a morning. He saluted the sun
as a robin might have done. After he had finished, he flew away toward
the east.

The shrike is a citizen of the world, being found in both hemispheres.
It does not appear that the European species differs essentially from
our own. In Germany he is called the