Sbrtfte^'IFlotes 



my doom. The wind is sou'-sou'east, 

 with a hint of orange-bloom fragrance on 

 its wing-tips — a Caribbean wind which 

 blows in the northward-going migrants. 

 Now is the time for my shrike to show his 

 mettle. The season of sport opens for him 

 when a tide of gaily painted singers and 

 twitterers breaks upon the Gulf-coast. He 

 harries every animated feather-ball within 

 eye-shot, but in fact kills few. In the 

 ecstasy of his diabolical fun he even finds 

 his voice with a short cry very far from 

 musical. A day or two, possibly a week, 

 he rages in his own quiet way, if I may 

 so state it — and then, after impaling a few 

 tiny innocents on the orange-tree spikes, 

 he again settles down to his ordinary show 

 of inscrutable stolidity. 



Were I a poet the shrike should have 

 an ode to celebrate its peculiarities, an ode 

 as remarkable as Shelley's on the skylark. 

 I would rhyme a word- melody telling all 

 about how he killed my baby chameleons 

 and worried my mocking-birds while they 

 were rearing their early brood. Of course 

 I could not rhapsodize over the song he 



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