TWO DAYS WITH THE TERNS 107 



A milliner's hunter or fisherman, however, might 

 have made a very different reply to the unimagina- 

 tive individual who asked the value of Terns. The 

 former would have told him that they were worth 

 about ten cents each for hat trimmings ; the latter 

 would have said that their eggs made excellent 

 omelets ; and each has done his best — the one to 

 lay all Terns on the altar of Fashion, the other 

 to see that none of their eggs escaped the frying 

 l^an. 



In the meantime a number of bird lovers have 

 taken up the battle for the Terns in their few re- 

 maining strongholds, and the brief history of Tern 

 destruction and protection is full of suggestive in- 

 cidents. 



It was about twenty years ago that Terns first 

 found favor in woman's eyes, and during the few 

 succeeding years hundreds of thousands of these 

 birds were killed on the Atlantic coast for milliners. 

 Cobb's Island, on the coast of Virginia, is credited 

 with having supplied forty thousand in a single 

 season, and, as one of tlie killers recently confessed 

 to me that he knew of fourteen hundred being killed 

 in a day, the story is doubtless true. Their delicate 

 white and pearl-gray feathers were, of course, liadly 

 blood-stained; but good and bad, the skins were 

 washed and then thrown into a barrel of plaster, 

 which was rolled up and down the beach until the 

 moisture was absorbed from their plumage. A 

 Long Island taxidermist used a patent churn for 

 this purpose. 



The destruction at other favorable points was 

 proportionately great, and in two or three years one 



