240



Mr. Hubert D. Astley.



are lighted from above, after the manner of the big tanks in the

Brighton Aquarium. Real material—bushes, grass, stones, etc.—

are used, and are brought from the very spots in which the original

scenes took place, whilst the backgrounds, painted by well-known

artists, are so cunningly devised that it is often difficult to discern

where the painting of grass, etc. begins and the genuine articles

leave off. With the Egrets, in the foreground are portions of trees

covered with long strands of lichen, amongst which the birds are

perching near their nests, some of which contain eggs, some young

ones, whilst you look down apparently into the depths of a weedy

and slimy lagoon, lying in the heart of a tangle of forest growth,

and in the distance innumerable Egrets are flying over the bushes

and the water. The birds in the foreground are stuffed, those in the

further distance are painted. The whole effect is intensely interest¬

ing and the work intensely skilful.


The Society for the Protection of Birds has for some years

striven to trumpet from the house-tops the iniquities of the plume

trade, but many women seem absolutely impervious and even callous

to its reports and entreaties. Men too are to blame, for long ago a bill

should have been passed by the English Government to absolutely

forbid the importation of birds’ plumes and skins for millinery pur¬

poses. Neither do some of those ladies who are highest in society

set the example they should. Feathers of Birds of Paradise, Crowned

Pigeons, Humming Birds, Egrets, etc. are still to be seen in women’s

hats, and there are many who do not care what the history of the

slaughter is, so long as they can wear what they think to be smart

and becoming to them. In these days of spiteful destruction at the

hands of suffragettes, it is a pity that a band of these women, who

can so easily make themselves notorious, do not concentrate some

of their energies upon striving to put down a cruelty for which their

sex is primarily responsible.


There was one woman not long ago who paid £200 for a hat—

and the fact was thoroughly and blatantly advertised—because that

head-gear was smothered in ‘ aigrettes,’ the plumes of forty or fifty

of the Little Egrets, which probably meant, in addition to their

destruction, the deaths of about one hundred young birds left

starving in their nests under a blazing southern sun !



