ing sun; no more solitary communion with helpful and healing
nature. My household gods must now be set up among people, with their
cares and troubles, where the immense tragedy of human life is
constantly forced into notice; and in no place in the wide world is
there more tragedy in every-day life than in peaceful and pious New
England.

[Sidenote: _THE ROLE OF REPORTER._]

Change of residence was not so simple an affair with me as it is with
the birds; would that it were! I had to spend half a day packing, and
another half undoing the work. I had to secure another temporary home,
where certain conveniences to which we human beings are slaves should
not be lacking, and with a family one could endure under the same roof.
All this must needs be settled before I could call on my new neighbors.
Time and patience accomplished everything, although the mercury was
soaring aloft among the nineties all the time; and at last came the
morning when I seated myself before the household I proposed to
interview for the benefit of the readers of our day, who demand (say the
newspaper authorities) facts and details of daily lives that were of old
considered private matters.

On these lines, therefore, I proceeded to study my shrikes. What I
discovered by watching early and late, by peeping at them before
breakfast and spying upon them after supper,--what they eat and
drink, how they behave to one another and their neighbors, what they
have to say or to sing, in fact, their whole story so far as it was
revealed to me,--I shall set down, nothing extenuating. Other observers
may have seen very different things, but that only proves what I am
constantly asserting: that birds are individuals; that because one
shrike does a certain thing is no sign that another will do the same; it
is not safe to judge the species _en masse_. This, therefore, is the
true chronicle of what I saw of one pair of loggerhead shrikes (_Lanius
ludovicianus_), in the northern extremity of Vermont, about the first of
July, 1894.

The discovery of the nest in the thorn-tree was not my own. A friend and
fellow bird-lover, driving one evening up this road, startled a bird
from the nest, and, checking her horse, looked on in amazement while,
one after another, six full-grown shrikes emerged from the tree and flew
away. Pondering this strange circumstance she drove on, and when
returning looked sharply out for the thorn-tree. This time one bird flew
from the nest, whi