Horrors! What is this?

Threads! Invisible, interlacing threads; tangled and full of pockets,
treacherously spanning the open space. It is a fowler's net! The linnet
is entangled. It flutters frantically but helplessly, and hangs there,
caught. Its alarm cry is frantically answered by the two strange,
invisible bird voices that come from the top of the tower!

The grove and the tower are A ROCCOLO! A huge, permanent, merciless,
deadly _trap_, for the wholesale capture of songbirds! The tower is the
hiding place of the fowler, and the calling birds are decoy birds whose
eyes have been totally blinded by red-hot wires in order that they will
call more frantically than birds with eyes would do. The whistling wings
that seemed a hawk were a sham, made by a racquet thrown through the air
by the fowler, through a slot in his tower. He keeps by him many such
racquets.

The door of the tower opens, and out comes the fowler. He is lowbrowed,
swarthy, ill kept, and wears rings in his ears. A soiled hand seizes the
struggling linnet, and drags it violently from the threads that
entangled it. A sharp-pointed twig is thrust straight through the head
of the helpless victim _at the eyes_, and after one wild, fluttering
agony--it is dead.

The fowler sighs contentedly, re-enters his dirty and foul-smelling
tower, tosses the feathered atom upon the pile of dead birds that lies
upon the dirty floor in a dirty corner,--and is ready for the next one.

Ask him, as did Mr. Astley, and he will tell you frankly that there are
about 150 dead birds in the pile,--starlings, sparrows, linnets,