Once when we were dining in the pasture we found out the cause of the booming noise we had often heard sounding through the woods.  Two men, each carrying in his hand a long club, shaped large at one end, appeared in the meadow and began looking among the long grasses which sheltered the nests of some meadow larks.  A number of the larks were on the wing, others sat on the rail fence rolling out cadenzas in concert in a gush of melody from their downy throats.  The men moved cautiously nearer under cover of the weeds.  Raising their long clubs to their shoulders they gazed along their narrow points a moment.  Without exactly knowing why, we took alarm, and larks, bobolinks, and cowbirds sped upward like the wind.  At the same instant something bright shimmered in the sunlight, and with it a horrid burst of noise and a puff of smoke.  We did not all get away, for some of the beautiful larks fell to the ground pierced by the sportsman’s deadly hail.

Again and again, all through that long, sad day we heard the ominous booming crash, and knew the savage work of killing was going on.

Among our acquaintances was a lame redbird who at one time had been trapped and made a prisoner, confined behind the bars of a wire cell for many weeks and months.  Luckily he made his escape one day when his grated door was accidentally opened, and he speedily made his way back to his dearly loved forest.

During the period of his imprisonment in the city he had picked up a great deal of information regarding the bird trade, and some of the facts recited by him of the terrible cruelties perpetrated and the carnage which had been going on for years, almost caused our feathers to stand upright in horror as we listened.

CHAPTER V

“Don’t, Johnny”

  Farewell happy fields, where Joy forever dwells.
          —­Milton.

A very pleasant, sociable fellow was this redbird, and often when on hot afternoons we were hiding in the treetops from the rays of the sun he told us stories and anecdotes about the people he had seen while he lived in the city.

He and his brother had been caught in a trap in the woods set by a farmer’s boy.  One cold spring morning when the boy came to look at his trap he was overjoyed to find he had snared two redbirds, and forthwith carried them to the village nearby and sold them to the grocer for five cents apiece, which sum he said he was going to invest in a rubber ball.

As he put the dime into his coat pocket he told the man that one of the birds was named Admiral Dewey and the other Napoleon Bonaparte.  The groceryman agreed that these names were good enough names for anybody, but he thought he’d change Bonaparte’s name to Teddy Roosevelt, as being easier to pronounce, and the two birds were accordingly given these titles then and there.  Not having any cage at hand to put them in, the man thought that for a few days the new-comers could share the quarters of an old sparrow he had in the rear end of the store until an extra cage could be procured.