FEATHER-PICTURES 181 
wicked little demon knew of those people just as well 
as he knows of us, and he had taught them to kill 
birds, too. Only as they had no guns they could not 
kill nearly so many of them as we can, so that there was 
no danger, then, of a beautiful bird getting rarer and 
rarer, until, at last, it is not to be found in the world any 
more, which is what happens now with us—at least it 
will if you do not stop it. But though it would have 
been much better to let these birds—which were often 
Humming-birds—go on living and flying about, and 
though no picture made with their feathers was nearly 
so beautiful as the feathers themselves were, growing 
upon them, yet these feather-pictures of the old 
Aztecs were very wonderful things, and it is a great 
pity that there are none of them left now, for us to 
look at. Nothing could bring the poor birds back to 
life, so we might just as well have had the pictures 
that they had helped to make. 
And we might have had some other pictures, too, that 
these people made, for they used to draw things, just as 
we do, and when they wanted to describe a thing they 
would often draw a picture of it, instead of only saying 
what it was like. Even their writing was all in pictures, 
for when they wanted to write—say the word ‘‘sun” or 
the word ‘‘ house ”—they would draw a little picture 
of the sun or of a house, only so quickly and with 
such a few strokes of the pen or the paint-brush (I 
