202 TAXIDERMY AND MODELLING 



ably tender-hearted and gentle ladies worshipping the Juggernaut 

 of Fashion, bring a blush of shame and resentment to the most 

 hardened masculine cheek ; yet the women appear not to know 

 nor care that mother-birds — lovely white egrets and other fairy- 

 like things — are caught upon their nests, their breast and back 

 feathers, often with the skin, torn out whilst the birds are still 

 alive, and the poor, bleeding, quivering, dumb things cast upon 

 the ground to die a cruel, lingering death, whilst their unhappy 

 young die of starvation before their eyes, and the butchers 

 hasten on, too busy in snatching fresh spoil, and too callous to 

 kill their poor maimed victims. 



"Wings" are obtained with but little less cruelty, and although 

 the birds from which they are cut are mostly shot and trapped, 

 yet the destruction of bird-life for the sake of a few feathers 

 is appalling, and never was this more forcibly brought home to 

 the writer's mind than when, geologising on the Yorkshire coast, 

 he met a man engaged in slaughtering as many terns or sea- 

 swallows as he could, for the sake only of their wings and tails. 

 With some skill, he had arranged for himself a decoy (see p. I o i), 

 and the sum and substance of his remarks upon the " trade " 

 was this. He was a first-class shot, quick yet cool, and, fortu- 

 nately, in nearly every case killed his bird dead, whilst he had 

 such business-like precision in loading and firing quickly that, 

 with an ordinary and common under-lever breechloader, with 

 hammers and without ejector, he was seen to kill seven terns 

 out of one passing flock, and said that he had killed nearly 

 thirty on one occasion as fast as he could load and fire. He 

 had slaughtered abput four hundred, and considered that less 

 than a thousand did not pay him. Gulls were of no use, being 

 " out of fashion," and " women were such fools " that they would 

 not wear the natural heads and wings of the "sea-swallows," 

 but the heads, tails, and wings must be pulled to pieces and 

 re-made in any nonsensical way dictated by Fashion. Asked 



