236 GRAY LADY AND THE BIRDS 
“But even here and on many lesser islands, with only 
lighthouses and their keepers for company, where there 
were no summer cottages or pleasure-seekers, until a few 
years ago, the Gulls were not safe, for they, like the White 
Herons of the South, were bonnet martyrs.” 
“Bonnet martyrs!’’ exclaimed Eliza Clausen, jumping 
as if some one had stuck a pin in her. ‘I don’t think they 
would look one bit nice on hats; why, they are so big that 
there wouldn’t be any hat, but all bird.” 
“You are quite right,’’ said Gray Lady, “but the whole 
Gull was not used. These beautiful white breast-feathers 
were made into turbans. Perhaps, on one side of 
these, a smaller cousin of the Gull, the Tern, or Sea 
Swallow, with its coral-red beak, would be perched by 
way of finish. Or else, soft bands made of the breast, 
and some of the handsomest wing-quills were used for 
trimming. 
“Not only were these feathers sold wholesale to the 
plume merchants and milliners, but people who went to 
the coast resorts would buy them of the sailors simply 
because they were pretty, without giving a thought to 
the lives they cost, or of how desolate and lonely the 
shores would be when there were no more Gulls. 
“There are comparatively few people, I earnestly be- 
lieve, who would wear feathers for ornament if they realized 
the waste of life that the habit causes. It is largely 
because people do not stop to think, and they do not 
associate the happy living bird with the lifeless feathers 
in the milliner’s window. But now that the Wise Men — 
yes, and wise women, too—have explained the matter, the 
protection of these beautiful sea-birds is an established fact. 
