familyship, his rights protected, his children educated, and the harvests of our 

 fields are his to share, though he often applies the firebrand to his benefactor's 

 house. Yet against our upright little "Citizen Bird," our neighbor and bene- 

 factor, an ornament and delight to our world, we are waging a crusade more 

 unnatural and unjust than any the world has known since the days of Herod; 

 and the "gentler sex" is waging it! 



In all ages until now the bird has been loved and protected. The ancients 

 revered them. Fable and song have immortalized them, little children regard 

 them with ecstacy, and in all the world I have never heard of a person who 

 did not love the birds. They enrich the imagery of the Book of Books, and 

 we have chosen a bird as the symbol of the strength and liberty of our country. 

 Upon our coins of silver and gold the eagle, whom the ancients named "the 

 Bird of Jove," the monarch of the empyrean air, sits in proud power, and has 

 come to be for us the "Bird of Freedom." 



Yet even the quills of this majestic bird, whose symbolism should set it 

 apart from common or profane associations by every American woman, is 

 degraded to the frivolous use of a shopping hat, jauntily thrust through the 

 ribbon band, stripped of its fine distinction — a graceless figure ! No meaner 

 uses should the plume of an eagle serve than to sign a patriotic people's declara- 

 tion of independence, or adorn a hero's helmet! 



In Cornwall there is an old superstition that to hurt or kill a robin or 

 wren brought retribution in the shape of a friend's death. Let us encourage 

 this superstition in America. 



And is it not questionable, apart from prejudice or sentiment, whether dead 

 birds do really adorn; whether it is really becoming to any woman "to wear like 

 the savage the scalps of the slain?" We are not usually enamoured of the 

 suggestion of death; and this stark little corpse out of which the beauty has 

 been twisted, the staring bead eyes, the rumpled plumage, the poor little beak 

 that will never again part in rapturous song; the wonderful wings we have 

 robbed of their matchless grace of flight— are these lovely? 



"We that never can make it 

 Yet dare to unmake it, 

 Dare take it and break it and throw it away." 



If it were only bad for the complexion, or caused horrid lines and blemishes 

 to wear these birds, there might then be an immediate remedy for this evil 

 fashion ; but the aigrette is beautiful and becoming in its airy grace, and so the 

 massacre goes on ! But I have yet to see a middle-aged woman to whom wings 

 and quills are becoming or did not accentuate the lines and defects, and by mid- 

 dle-aged I mean fifty-five or sixty;; not being a newspaper reporter who calls 

 fifty "aged." 



I know all the soothing little emollients which we apply to our consciences 

 when they hurt. I have heard again and again the specious arguments, an3 

 the weather-beaten subterfuges still stand. 



810 



