A THORNY MONSTER. 41 



owed by it, was, as I now discovered, a thorny 

 tree, " honey locust " it is called. Ominous prox- 

 imity ! I resolved to investigate. Perhaps I 

 should find the birds' place of storage. I crossed 

 the track and went to the tree. What a struc- 

 ture it was ! A mere framework for thorns, and 

 a finer array of them it would be hard to find, 

 from the tiny affair an inch in length, suitable 

 to hold a small grasshopper, to foot-long spikes, 

 big enough to impale a crow. Not only was 

 every branch and every twig bristling with them, 

 but so charged was the whole tree with the 

 "feeling" of thorns, that it actually sent out 

 great clumps of them from the bare trunk, where 

 there was not a shadow of excuse for being. 

 They grew in a confused mass, so that at first I 

 thought there had been a hole which some per- 

 son had stopped by crowding it full of those 

 vegetable needles, at all angles, and of all sizes 

 up to the largest. On one side alone of the 

 trunk, not more than five feet high, were eight 

 of these eruptions of thorns. Could the most 

 bloodthirsty shrike desire a more commodious 

 larder? 



I looked carefully, dreading to see evidence of 

 their use in the traditional way. Outside there, 

 on the telegraph wire, sat one of the birds, very 

 much at home ; it was the height of the season, 

 and the country was swarming with young birds. 



