EXOTIC BIRDS FOB BRITAIN. 
89 
life in the inferior animals has come or is coming 
to be merely a thing to be lightly taken by human 
hands, in order that its dropped garment may be 
sold for filthy lucre. There are warehouses in this 
city where it is possible for a person to walk 
ankle-deep — literally to wade — in bright-plumaged 
bird-skins, and see them piled shoulder-high on 
either side of him — a sight to make the angels 
weep ! Not the angel called woman. It is not 
that she is naturally more cruel than man ; bleeding 
wounds and suffering in all its forms, even the sigh 
of a burdened heart, appeal to her quick sympathies, 
and draw the ready tears ; but her imagination 
helps her less. The appeal must in most cases be 
direct and through the medium of her senses, else 
it is not seen and not heard. If she loves the 
ornament of a gay-winged bird, and is able to wear 
it with a light heart, it is because it calls up no 
mournful image to her mind ; no little tragedy 
enacted in some far-off wilderness, of the swift 
child of air fallen and bleeding out its bright life, 
ahd its callow nestlings, orphaned of the breast 
that warmed them, dying of hunger in the tree. 
We know, at all events, that out of a female 
population of many millions in this country, so far 
only ten women, possibly fifteen, have been found 
to raise their voices — raised so often and so loudly 
on other questions — to protest against the barbarous 
