54 What Birds Have Done With Me 



one left him bare-headed, and the other half 

 deafened him; and fear gripped his heart lest, in 

 what seemed the onward rush of all things, the 

 wings would carry him away. How beautiful 

 they were, how graceful, many had the flush of 

 both the dawn and the evening sky on their breast, 

 and the eyes with which they looked at you were 

 fearless and full of confidence. No one knew it 

 at that time but they constituted America's one 

 characteristic "Moving Picture" that all the 

 countless billions of money since produced by our 

 Civilization could not now replace. But more 

 than this; let us suppose the physician of one of 

 our multi-millionaires, J. Pierpont Morgan, said 

 to be dying at Rome, had ordered for him a Pas- 

 senger Pigeon, as the one thing that would save 

 his life, the expenditure of his entire fortune, of 

 fifty millions, would not have obtained it for him. 

 This was the bird that the early settler netted, 

 trapped, pounded from the roost by wagon loads 

 and fed to hogs and used as fertilizer, and slaugh- 

 tered and left where they fell to rot. Under the 

 old Mosaic Law, a young, domestic Pigeon might 

 be offered up as a sacrifice for sin, but the Civil- 

 ization tljat we are expected to teach our children 

 to regard as splendid, allowed all our wild 

 pigeons to be sacrificed for naught; and the shame 

 of their destruction should evermore be chronicled 

 among our national sins. 



