{TWO DAYS WITH TIE 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 
pan. 
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 the 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, badly 
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 
