Hark!  A whirring, whistling sound fills the air, like the air tone of a flying hawk’s wings.  A hawk!  A hawk!

Down plunges the scared linnet, blindly, frantically, into the space sheltered by the grove!

Horrors!  What is this?

Threads!  Invisible, interlacing threads; tangled and full of pockets, treacherously spanning the open space.  It is a fowler’s net!  The linnet is entangled.  It flutters frantically but helplessly, and hangs there, caught.  Its alarm cry is frantically answered by the two strange, invisible bird voices that come from the top of the tower!

The grove and the tower are A ROCCOLO!  A huge, permanent, merciless, deadly trap, for the wholesale capture of songbirds!  The tower is the hiding place of the fowler, and the calling birds are decoy birds whose eyes have been totally blinded by red-hot wires in order that they will call more frantically than birds with eyes would do.  The whistling wings that seemed a hawk were a sham, made by a racquet thrown through the air by the fowler, through a slot in his tower.  He keeps by him many such racquets.

The door of the tower opens, and out comes the fowler.  He is lowbrowed, swarthy, ill kept, and wears rings in his ears.  A soiled hand seizes the struggling linnet, and drags it violently from the threads that entangled it.  A sharp-pointed twig is thrust straight through the head of the helpless victim at the eyes, and after one wild, fluttering agony—­it is dead.

The fowler sighs contentedly, re-enters his dirty and foul-smelling tower, tosses the feathered atom upon the pile of dead birds that lies upon the dirty floor in a dirty corner,—­and is ready for the next one.

Ask him, as did Mr. Astley, and he will tell you frankly that there are about 150 dead birds in the pile,—­starlings, sparrows, linnets, greenfinches, chaffinches, goldfinches, hawfinches, redstarts, blackcaps, robins, song thrushes, blackbirds, blue and coal tits, fieldfares and redwings.  He will tell you also, that there are seven other roccolos within sight and twelve within easy walking distance.  He will tell you, as he did Mr. Astley, that during that week he had taken about 500 birds, and that that number was a fair average for each of the 12 other roccolos.

This means the destruction of about 5,000 songbirds per week in that neighborhood alone! Another keeper of a roccolo told Mr. Astley that during the previous autumn he took about 10,000 birds at his small and comparatively insignificant roccolo.

And above that awful roccolo of slaughtered innocents rose a wooden cross, in memory of Christ, the Merciful, the Compassionate!

Around the interior of the entwined sapling tops that formed the fatal bower of death there hung a semicircle of tiny cages containing live decoys,—­chaffinches, hawfinches, titmice and several other species.  “The older and staider ones call repeatedly,” says Mr. Astley, “and the chaffinches break into song.  It is the only song to be heard in Italy at the time of the autum migration.”