Indeed, I have thought that all forms of life in the Old World were
marked by greater prominence of type, or stronger characteristic and
fundamental qualities, than with us,--coarser and more hairy and
virile, and therefore more powerful and lasting. This opinion is still
subject to revision, but I find it easier to confirm it than to
undermine it.


IV

But let me change the strain and contemplate for a few moments this
feathered bandit,--this bird with the mark of Cain upon him, _Lanius
borealis,_--the great shrike or butcher-bird. Usually the character of
a bird of prey is well defined; there is no mistaking him. His claws,
his beak, his head, his wings, in fact his whole build, point to the
fact that he subsists upon live creatures; he is armed to catch them
and to slay them. Every bird knows a hawk and knows him from the start,
and is on the lookout for him. The hawk takes life, but he does it to
maintain his own, and it is a public and universally known fact. Nature
has sent him abroad in that character, and has advised all creatures of
it. Not so with the shrike; here she has concealed the character of a
murderer under a form as innocent as that of the robin. Feet, wings,
tail, color, head, and general form and size are all those of a
songbird,--very much like that master songster, the mockingbird,--yet
this bird is a regular Bluebeard among its kind. Its only
characteristic feature is its beak, the upper mandible having two sharp
processes and a sharp hooked point. It cannot fly away to any distance
with the bird it kills, nor hold it in its claws to feed upon it. It
usually impales its victim upon a thorn, or thrusts it in the fork of a
limb. For the most part, however, its food seems to consist of