244 What Birds Have Done With Me 



wild-life sanctuaries. He was a man of the out- 

 of-doors, a hunter and a bird-lover. It was said 

 of him that "he shot lions with a rifle and birds 

 with a field glass. The second sport he loved 

 better than the first." How much of a real bird- 

 lover he was is just becoming known and the 

 world is going to remember him not on account 

 of the lions, or other wild animals he killed and 

 thus preserved, but for the efforts he put forth to 

 make bird protection respectable and popular. 

 The statesman and the writer will now be merged 

 into the invisible defender of the invisible de- 

 fenders of forest and field and all growing things. 

 "Mourny," "Moses," "Mr. Esau" and "Can- 

 ada" have long been dead, but death, only made 

 them, through me, invisible defenders of things 

 very much alive. The hard bitter materialism so 

 dominant in life to-day has to be reckoned with 

 and we have to learn the lesson of a higher, finer 

 civilization that takes cognizance of the invisible 

 and spiritual that moves the obvious and material. 

 I, for one, love to think of every hard dollar 

 that Mrs. Russell Sage gave to establish a Bird- 

 refuge in the South, for instance, as being trans- 

 muted into tender spiritual impulses for better 

 things that invisibly will flow on and on so long 

 as Hope shall prompt Love to conquer human 

 -selfishness. 



