5D BEAUTIFUL BIRDS 
from the yellow man, as well as a great many others 
which have been brought to him from all the country 
and from all the islands round about, into one of 
those large kinds of boxes called ‘‘crates,” that I 
have told you about, and it is put on board a ship 
where there are a great many others of the same kind, 
all full of the skins and feathers of beautiful birds 
that have been killed. And the ship sails to England, 
and then up the Thames to London, where the crates 
are taken out and put into great vans and driven 
away to the great ugly warehouses to be un- 
packed and laid on the floor there in a heap, all 
as I have told you. You know what happens to 
them then. 
And now J will tell you something funny that | 
daresay you would never have thought of, but which is 
quite true all the same. That great heap of brightly 
coloured feathers lying on the floor, to make which 
hundreds of thousands of the most beautiful birds in 
the world have been killed, and hundreds of hundreds 
of thousands of their young ones that would have grown 
up beautiful, too, have been starved to death in the nest 
—that great big heap of the loveliest plumage is not 
so lovely, not nearly so beautiful as one living thrush 
or one living blackbird or one living swallow or one 
living robin-redbreast. That is the difference between 
life and death. A live Bird of Paradise is hundreds 
