THE DAMN-BIRD. 
9i 
many. The California rancher continues to go through his 
peach orchards “thinning out the fruit” in early summer, 
with his shotgun or saucer of poison at his elbow wherewith 
to exterminate feathered workmen who would fain do the 
work of thinning for him regardless of wages. The time may 
come, as it has come to many a Massachusetts farmer guilty 
of a similar hatred toward certain other birds, when he will 
wish by his seven senses that the linnets were back, cursing 
meanwhile the little scale-folk which aforetime the linnet 
swallowed along with the rest of his dinner, intentionally or no. 
t.ffl.uavisLng. to. THE LINNET NEST. 
And so it comes to pass that the linnet will never wear a 
halo until he is a ghost. But he isn’t a ghost yet, and so his 
halo is not in evidence. A recent writer condemns the bird 
without mercy and says, “There seems no way of ridding the 
country of him save by poisoned water, and this probably de¬ 
stroys as many song birds as linnets. Perhaps in this case the 
small boy and his air-gun is the surest remedy.” Well, per¬ 
haps it is not commonly known that the air-gun in the hands 
of a small boy points directly to the reform school or the pen¬ 
itentiary, for by the time he has pulled the trigger fifty times 
or less, he has shot his own heart out. But we are not discuss¬ 
ing the small boy of California, though his case deserves men- 
