human, it was plain I had seen the last of the thorn-tree family; for I knew positively that in that hour no one had gone to or come from the nest, and I was sure, from my knowledge of her, that the sitting bird would not remain an hour without eating, even if her mate had stayed away so long. Of course, I concluded, that girl had told her discovery, and some boy had heard, and broken up the home. I looked carefully on every side. The nest seemed undisturbed, but not a sign of life appeared about it, and sadly enough I folded my chair and went back to the village.

Six days passed, in which I avoided going up the lonely road, the scene of my disappointment, but I turned my attention to bird affairs in the town. One case which interested me greatly was of "pauperizing a bird. It was a least flycatcher, and her undoing was her acceptance of nesting material, which her human friend, the oft-mentioned local bird-lover, supplied. To secure a unique nest for herself, when the flycatcher babies should have abandoned it, this wily personage, who was the accepted providence of half the birds in the vicinity, and on terms of great familiarity with some of them, threw out narrow strips of cloth of various colors, to tempt the small nest-builder. At first the wise little madam refused to use the gayer pieces, but being beguiled by the device of sewing a bright one between two of duller hue, her scruples were overcome; and after that, her fall into total dependence was easy and complete. cepted the most brilliant pieces that were offered, and built her nest therewith.

She ac

to pull the whole to pieces. Then when Chebek, who is no coward, had succeeded in putting an end to neighborly interference, the nest began to show a deplorable disinclination to "stay put." Whether the material could not be properly fastened, or whether the bird was so demoralized as to shirk ordinary precautions, the fact is that every breeze shook the little structure, and four completed nests of this unnatural sort fell, one after another, in ruins to the ground. Then motherly instinct came to the rescue: she refused further aid, removed herself to a distance, built a new nest, after the accredited flycatcher fashion, and it is supposed brought out her brood safely, if rather late. So hard it is, in the bird world as in the human, to help, and not hurt.

More interesting, even, than this flycatcher episode was an adventure one evening when I walked far out on a road, one side of which was deep woods, while the other was bordered by pasture and meadows. My object in going was to hear a white-throated sparrow, who often sang in that vicinity.

I had been resting on my camp-stool very quietly for half an hour, and was just thinking it time to return home, when a strange sort of clacking cry startled me. At first I thought it was made by a frog with a bad cold; but it grew louder, and changed in quality, till it became a whining sound that might be made either by a baby or by some small animal. I looked very carefully up the road whence the sound seemed to come, but saw nothing excepting a robin, who, perched on the highest post of a fence, was looking and listening with great apparent interest, but without making a sound himself, very unusual proceeding on the part of this bird, who always has a great deal to say about everything.

a

The cries increased in volume and frequency, and I started slowly up the road, uncertain whether I should come upon a young fox or other wild beast, but deter

near,

mined to solve the mystery. As I drew I began to be conscious of a knocking sound in the woods beside the road. It was like a light tapping on hollow wood, and it regularly followed each cry. I was at once reassured. It must be a woodpecker, I thought, they do make some strange noises; and there was a large one, the pileated, said to inhabit these woods, though I had never been able to see him. I went on more confidently then, for I must see what woodpecker baby could utter such cries. As I continued to advance, though I could still see nothing, I noticed that the tapping grew louder every moment.

Suddenly there was a movement at the edge of a thick clump of ferns, and my eyes fell upon what I thought was, after all, a big toad or frog. It hopped like one of these reptiles, and as it was growing dusky, feathers and fur and bare skin looked much alike. But being anxious to know positively, I went on, and when I reached it I saw that it was a young bird, nearly as big as a robin just out of the nest. Then I dropped all impedimenta, and gave myself unreservedly to the catching of that bird. He fled under the ferns, which were like a thick mat, and I stooped and parted them, he flying ever ahead till he reached the end and came out in sight. Then I pounced upon him, and had him in my hands.

Such a shriek as he gave! while he struggled and bit, and proved himself very savage indeed. More startling, however, than his protest was a cry of anguish that answered it from the woods, a heart-rending, terrible cry, the wail of a mother about to be bereaved. I looked up, and lo! in plain sight, in her agony forgetting her danger, and begging by every art in her power, a cuckoo. Her distress went to my heart; I could not resist her pleading. One instant I held that vociferous cuckoo baby, to have a good look at him, speaking soothingly to the mother the while, and then opened my hand, when he half flew, half scram

the same strange calling of a cuckoo mother, a weird, unearthly, knocking sound, not in the least like the ordinary "kuk! kuk!" of the bird. I should never have suspected that it was anything but the tap of an unusually cautious woodpecker, if I had not caught her at it that night.

On the sixth evening after I had thought myself bereaved of the shrikes I went out for a walk with my friend, and we turned our steps into the lonely road. As we approached the thorn, what was my surprise to see the shrike in his old place on the fence, and, after waiting a few minutes, to see his mate go to the ground for her lunch, as if nothing had happened!

Then they had not deserted! But how and why all life about the nest had been suspended for one hour on the Fourth of July is a puzzle to this day. However it may have happened, I was delighted to find the birds safe, and at once resumed my study; going out the next morning as usual, staying some hours, and again toward night for another visit.

Now I was sure it must be time for the young to be out, for I knew positively that the bird had been sitting fourteen days, and twenty-one days had passed since she was frightened off her nest twice in one day.

I redoubled my vigilance, but I saw no change in the manners of the pair till the morning of July 12th. All night there had been a heavy downpour, and the morning broke dismally, with strong wind and a drizzling rain. I knew the

lonely road would be most unattractive, but no vagaries of wind or weather could keep me away at this crisis. I found it all that I had anticipated — and more. The clay soil was cut up from fence to fence by cows' feet, and whether it presented an unbroken puddle or a succession of small ones made by the hoof-prints, it was everywhere so slippery that retaining one's footing was no slight task, and of course there was no pretense of a sidewalk. Add to this the difficulty of holding an umbrella against the fierce gusts, and it may be imagined that my pathway that morning was not "strewn with roses.

In some fashion, however, I did at last reach the thorn-tree, planted my chair in the least wet spot I could find, and, tucking my garments up from the ground, sat down. At first I discarded my unmanageable umbrella, till the raindrops obscuring my opera - glass forced me to open it again. And all these preliminaries had to be settled before I could so much as look at the nest.

Something had happened, as I saw at once; the manners of the birds were very different from what they had been all these days I had been studying them. Both of them were at the nest when I looked, but in a moment one flew, and the other slipped into her old seat, though not so entirely into it as usual. Heretofore she had been able to hide herself so completely that it was impossible to tell whether she were there or not. Even the ⚫tail, which in most birds is the unconcealable banner that proclaims to the birdstudent that the sitter is at home, even this unruly member she had been able to hide in some way, but this morning it remained visible.

In a minute the shrike returned and fed somebody, I suppose his mate, since she did not move aside; and again in another minute he repeated the operation. So he went on bringing food perhaps a dozen times in close succession. Then he rested a few minutes, when she who

through the long days of sitting had been so calm and quiet seemed all at once as restless as any warbler. She rose on the edge of the nest, and uttered the low, yearning cry I had heard from him, then flew to the ground, returned, perched on the edge, leaned over, and gave three pokes as if feeding. Then she flew to another part of the tree, thence to a fence post, then back again to the edge of the nest. In a moment the uneasy bird slipped into her old place, but, apparently too restless to stay, was out again in a few seconds, when she stood up in the nest and began calling, a loud but musical two-note call, the second tone a third higher than the first, and different from anything I had heard from her before. If it were a call to her mate, he did not at once appear, and she relieved her feelings by flying to the maple and perching a few minutes, though so great was the attraction at home that she could stay away but a short time.

Of course I concluded from all this that the young shrikes were out, and I longed with all my heart to stay and watch the charming process of changing from the ungainly creatures they were at that moment to the full-grown and feathered beauties they would be when they appeared on the tree; to see them getting their education, learning to follow their parents about, and finally seeking their own food, still keeping together in a family party, as I had seen them once before, elsewhere, lovely, innocent younglings whom surely no one could find it in his heart to call "butchers" or assassins." Then, too, I wanted to see the head of the family, who in the character of spouse had shown himself so devoted, so above reproach, in the new rôle of father and teacher, in which I had no doubt he would be equally ad

66

mirable.

But dearly as I love birds, there are other ties still dearer, and just then there came a call that made me leave the pair with their new joy, pack my trunks, and

speed, night and day, halfway across the continent, beyond the Great Divide, to a certain cosy valley in the heart of the Rocky Mountains.

Before I left, however, I committed the little family in the thorn-tree to the care of my friend the bird-lover; and a few weeks later there came over the mountains to me this conclusion to the story, written by Mrs. Nelly Hart Woodworth, of St. Albans : —

"I was at the shrikes' nest Thursday last. [This was nine days after my final visit.] I sat down on the knoll beyond the nest, and waited quietly for fifteen minutes. No signs of life in nest or neighborhood, save the yearning cry of the lark as it alighted on the top of the thorn-tree. After I was convinced that, in some unaccountable manner, the shrikes had been spirited away before they were half big enough, I changed my place to the other side of the tree, out of sight from the nest. When I had been there for a long time, I heard distinctly a low whispering in the nest, and lo! the butcher babies had become sentient beings, and were talking very softly and sweetly among themselves. They had evidently miscalculated about my departure. Then two or three little heads stuck out above the edge, and the soft stirring of baby wings was apparent. They cuddled and nestled and turned themselves, and one little butcher hoisted himself upon the upper side of the nest, stood upright briefly and beat his wings, then

sank into the nest, which was full of life and movement. So much for that day.

"Friday one stood upon the edge of the nest, and others looked out, but no feeding bird came while I was there.

"Saturday I was in fortune, as I met in the vicinity the boy who drives the village cows. Two heads only were visible over the edge. But the boy, with a boy's genius for investigation, brought a fence rail, put it under the branch, and shook them up a little. They only huddled closer. At my suggestion he gave a more vigorous shake, and a baby climbed from the nest, a foot or two above, then flew as well as anybody clear up into the top of the tree. Such a pretty baby! breast white as snow, lovely black crescent through the eyes, and the dearest little tail imaginable, half an inch long, and flirted up and down continually. "The other bird for there were but two ran up the twigs for two feet, but quickly returned to the nest, and would not leave it again, though we could see its wondering eyes look out and peer at us. Both were gone the next day (twelve days old). And thus endeth the butcher episode."

Now also must end- for a timemy study of this interesting bird. But I shall not forget it, and I shall seek occasion to study it again and again, till I have proved, if I find it true, that the shrike deserves better of us than the character we have given him; that he is not nearly "so black as he is painted." Olive Thorne Miller.

ONE of the characteristic features of the latter part of the nineteenth century, in the history of literature, will be the 1 Owing to differences in building materials and methods, the maçon answers rather to our plasterer than to our mason.

number of biographies and autobiographies which it has brought forth. Third and fourth rate people have felt bound to tell the world all about themselves, or about other people equally third or fourth rate. Time, the great winnower, will no

It is mainly on the last two grounds that a recent volume, published in a second-rate French town, in the eightieth year of the author's life, claims our interest. The Mémoires de Léonard, Ancien Garçon Maçon (Bourganeuf, 1895), the name "Léonard" being an avowed, and, so far as I can see, perfectly useless pseudonym for "Martin Nadaud," though by no means devoid in many parts of a certain rough power of style, have no claim to be regarded as a literary or artistic model. The sequence of the narrative is often clumsy or involved; the writer, though he for years taught his own language, not unfrequently sins against its rules. But the work is thoroughly original, and while bringing out, all the more vividly through its artlessness, the picture of a strong, earnest nature breasting dauntlessly the tides of social and political effort, preserves for us also, with invaluable realism, a picture of peasant and artisan life in the France of sixty and even more years ago. M. Nadaud, I may say, is a friend of my own, of many years' standing, and I can vouch for his honesty and truthfulness.1

1 For those to whom Martin Nadaud is but a name, the following summary of his career may be of use: born in 1815; came up to Paris in 1830 to work at his father's trade; a candidate for the National Assembly in his department, 1848; elected, 1849; spoken of as a candidate for the presidency of the republic, 1850; arrested at the coup d'état, December 2, 1850, and banished for life came over to England after a short stay in Belgium; worked

The dedication of the book deserves to be quoted at length:

"To my three grandchildren, Louis, Marie, Hélène Bouquet. These recollections being a family book, I dedicate them to you, as well as to Henri Lombard and Alphonse Bertrand, my two grandsons-in-law, both so worthy of having come into our family.

"I do not forget my two great-grandchildren, Michel and Julienne Lombard, and am indeed very happy to add their names to this dedication.

"I had you under my direction, as orphans, when very young, my dear children, and I am happy to do you to-day the justice of saying that you have always shown me the greatest affection and the greatest respect.

"The dearest wish of your grandfather and great-grandfather is that, in all circumstances of life, you will behave yourselves as honest citizens, that you will keep up amongst yourselves the purest and closest friendship, and that you will always bear high and steadfast the republican flag, the flag which will insure be certain of this quiet destinies to our dear and worthy fatherland.

MARTIN NADAUD."

I have said that the picture presented to us by the Mémoires is one of both peasant and artisan life; for it is a peculiarity of many of the workmen employed in the French building trades, and was formerly so of nearly all, that they are peasants in the winter, artisans the rest of the year. It is from the central departments, representing the old provinces of Le Limousin and La Marche, that these chiefly come, the two main

first at his trade, afterwards became a French teacher; was included in the amnesty of 1859, but refused to swear fidelity to the Empire, and returned to exile, thenceforth voluntary, till 1870, when he went back to France; was for six months prefect of his department, then sat in the Paris Municipal Council; was elected to the Assembly in 1876, and sat till 1889, being for the last few years questeur of the Assembly, but was not reëlected in 1889.