66 CHARACTER IN FEATHERS. 



and Mr. B., who hold the deeds of the " prop- 

 erty," walk through it to look at the timber, 

 with an eye to dollars and cents. The botanist 

 has his errand there, the zoologist his, and the 

 child his. Oftenest of all, perhaps (for barba- 

 rism dies hard, and even yet the ministers of 

 Christ find it a capital sport to murder small 

 fishes), — oftenest of all comes the man, poor 

 soul, who thinks of the forest as of a place to 

 which he may go when he wishes to amuse him- 

 self by killing something. Meanwhile, the rab- 

 bits and the squirrels, the hawks and the owls, 

 look upon all such persons as no better than in- 

 truders (do not the woods belong to those who 

 live in them ?) ; while nobody remembers the 

 meteorologist, who nevertheless smiles in his 

 sleeve at all these one-sided notions, and says to 

 himself that he knows the truth of the matter. 



So is it with everything; and with all the 

 rest, so is it with the birds. The interest they 

 excite is of all grades, from that which looks 

 upon them as items of millinery, up to that of 

 the makers of ornithological systems, who ran- 

 sack the world for specimens, and who have no 

 doubt that the chief end of a bird is to be named 

 and catalogued, — the more synonyms the bet- 

 ter. Somewhere between these two extremes 

 comes the person whose interest in birds is 

 friendly rather than scientific ; who has little 



