198 BIRDS IN A VILLAGE. 
sea-birds faring ? Certainly the " sportsman " has 
not mended his ways, nor the hotel-keepers on the 
coasts, who still advertise "sea-bird shooting" in 
the metropolitan papers every year from August to 
October. 
A few months ago one of our leading illustrated 
weeklies contained a large picture and a column or 
so of letterpress, showing and explaining how 
English gentlemen amused themselves when 
voyaging in large steamers in the Pacific Ocean by 
taking the albatross with hook and line. The 
floating bait swallowed, and the hook stuck fast in 
its gullet or stomach, the bird is forced to fly after 
the ship, and is finally drawn down on to the deck. 
A large number of albatrosses could be thus 
captured in the course of a day. And for what 
purpose ? To chop off* their heads with a hatchet 
or a butcher's knife ; the head, " with Roman beak 
sublime," to be kept as a memento of the voyage, 
or given to a friend at home ; the long slender 
bones of the pinions to be taken out and cleaned 
for pipe stems ; the mutilated carcase to be cast 
back into the sea. For the sea does not grieve for 
her lost children ; and the albatross has no soul to 
haunt its murderer. That is an old vanished 
superstition ! 
I suppose that those who amuse themselves by 
slaughtering albatrosses — a bird that does no injury 
