Then arrived the bombshell.

One of the Blackie youngsters, stump-tailed, frog-mouthed, blundering, foolish, gawky, and squawking, landed, all of a heap, right into the very middle of the picnic-party.

Mrs. Blackie very nearly had a fit on the spot, and the shrike judged that the time had about arrived for her to quit that vicinity.

Blackie himself, to do him justice, kept cool enough to do nothing.  Wives will say that he was just husband all over, but there were reasons abroad.  One of them shot past Blackie, who was low down, a second later and a yard away, and had he not been absolutely still, and therefore as invisible as one of the most conspicuous of birds in the wild can be, he would have known in that instant, or the next, what lies upon the other side of death.

Another reason shot through the lower hedge, and, both together, they fell upon the young bird.

They were the cat of the house and her half-grown kitten, and they were upon the unhappy youngster before you could shout, “Murder!”

What followed was painful.  Mrs. Blackie went clean demented.  Blackie went—­not so demented. (It always appeared to me that his was a more practical mind than his wife’s, perhaps because he wore a more conspicuous livery.) Mrs. Blackie kept passing and repassing the cats’ backs, flying from bough to bough, and sometimes touching and sometimes not touching them.  It was useless, of course, this pathetic charging; and it was foolish.

Blackie charged, too, but not within feet.

Suddenly the old cat, who had had one eye upon Mrs. Blackie the whole time, sprang up and struck quickly twice.  There was a chain of shrieks from Mrs. Blackie, and down she went in the grip of the clawed death.  She never got up again.

What had happened was simple enough.  One of the laborers working on the trench, knowing of the nest, had, out of curiosity, approached a little too close, when the bevy of youngsters, being ready to fly, but not knowing it before this great fright, burst apart at his approach like a silent cannon cracker.  The fear showed them they could use their wings.

All three had made, flying low and weakly, for the nearest hedge, which was the garden hedge—­two to the side which comprised their father’s hunting-ground, and one to the side dominated by their ma.  And the old cat and her kitten had seen them coming, and had given chase.

* * * * * *

Blackie discovered his remaining progeny sitting about in bushes, squawking, a few minutes later, when he returned, somewhat agitated to his precious lawn, and there he promptly proceeded to feed them.  The task was such a large one, and took so long, and so many worms had to be cut up, and so much bread, and, I may say, when all else failed, so many daisies had to be picked, before he finally silenced their ceaseless, craving remarks, that, by the time he had finished feeding himself and had a clean up, something of the pain of the tragedy had gone from him.