8 BEAUTIFUL BIRDS 
So, as it is cruel to kill the birds, and as they are 
not nearly so beautiful when they are dead as they are 
when they are alive, and as the world is full of 
tender-hearted women to love them and plead for 
them and to say, “‘ Do not kill them,” perhaps you will 
wonder why it is that they are killed. I will tell you 
how it hascome about. When Dame Nature had ima- 
gined all her beautiful birds, and then cut them out of 
that wonderful stuff of hers—the stuff of life—with 
her marvellous pair of scissors, she said to her eldest 
daughter—whose name is Truth—‘‘ Now I will leave 
them and go away for a little, for there are other 
places where I must imagine things and cut them out 
with my scissors.” Truth said, ‘Do not leave the 
birds, for there are men in the world with hard hearts 
and a film over their eyes. They will see the birds, 
but not their beauty, because of the film, and they 
will kill them because of their hearts, which are like 
marble or, rock jor, stone.) “Cl hey are) qt isetraess 
said Dame Nature, ‘‘and indeed it was of some such 
material that | cut them out. I had my reasons, but 
you would never understand them, so I shall not tell 
you what they were. But there are not only my 
men in the world; there are my women too. I cut 
them out of something very different. It was-soft and 
yielding, and that part that went to make the heart 
was like water—like soft water. I made them, too, 
