THE COMMON TERN 255 



common Tern. The persons who for years slaughtered birds 

 wholesale and without check for "millinery purposes" would 

 have exterminated this species, at least all along the Atlantic 

 coast. 



In an evil hour some person without compassion, and 

 with no more taste for the eternal fitness of things than a 

 Texas steer, conceived the idea of placing stuffed Terns on 

 women's hats, as "ornaments." Now, unfortunately, wom- 

 an's one universal weakness lies in the belief that whatever 

 the Fashion Fetish commands that she shall wear, that is 

 necessarily a beautiful thing for her to deck herself withal. 

 As a result, we have seen thousands of angular, dagger-beaked, 

 sharp-winged, dirty-plumaged, rough-looking and distorted 

 Terns, each one a feathered Horror, clamped to the fronts 

 and sides of the hats of women, and worn as head ornaments! 



Those objects spoke very poorly for their wearers; for 

 since the daughters of Eve first began to wear things on their 

 heads, the Rumpled Tern is the ugliest thing ever devised 

 for head-gear. Thus has been developed a new bird species, 

 which we will christen as above, with Sterna horrida as its 

 Latin name. Thanks to the Audubon law, however, the 

 wearing of stuffed birds has, with fashionable people, quite 

 gone out of fashion, and the only exceptions now seen are on 

 the heads of servants, who, for motives of economy, are wear- 

 ing the cast-off millinery of their mistresses. 



The Tern is much smaller than the herring gull; it has a 

 very short neck, very long and angular wings, and when on 

 the ground is not a bird of beautiful form. On the wing, how- 

 ever, and especially over the breakers, its appearance is grace- 



