THE KINGFISHER-CATCHER. 
•15 
told me that he intended to work his way to Madras, where he would get a good 
price for his stock. He had no doubt that before he got there he would have 
wings enough to make this long journey on foot, across the whole breadth of India 
from the west coast where I met him, a profitable enterprise. How I burned to 
kick that fellow into some sense of his own shame, and to scatter his spoils and 
set his poor captives free. But the day has gone by when the Englishman might 
do such things in India. The people have learned to understand the impartiality 
of British law too well, and there is unhappily no law to protect my rights in 
a case like this. For I claim that I and every man with a heart and eyes have 
a right in all the beautiful wild things with which God has adorned this world 
for us. And since there is no law to maintain our tights and shield us from 
outrage, it was a righteous feeling that prompted me to take the law into my own 
hands and vindicate humanity. But prudence prevailed and I let the fellow go on 
his murderous way. There are many like him, how many I do not know, but 
I know that hundreds of bales of birds’ wings appear among the exports in the 
returns of the Madras custom house every year, each bale a long record of 
atrocities which it makes one melancholy to think of. 
I need scarcely say that the kingfisher-catcher is not a caste. His trade is no 
part of the Hindu system, but a product of western civilisation. He is a purveyor 
to the dames of Europe who like to be seen in public with a wing in their hats, 
and the blood of the birds he butchers is on their skirls. And they, gentle souls, 
are founding hospitals for homeless cats and olfering crumbs to the robin at the 
window, or putting out food for the hungry sparrows, and it has never occurred 
to them that the pretty wings in their hats did not fall of themselves from the 
bright birds that once flew with them. 
“ Sweethearted you, whose light blue eyes 
Are tender over drowning flies.” 
It is not difficult to picture the shudder with which you would turn from the 
kingfisher-catcher if you could see him at his trade. But he is in your pay. 
Every lady who wears a wing or a tail, or a whole humming-bird, in her hat, is 
subscribing to support that wretch and all of his kind just as directly as she is 
helping to send missionaries to the heathen when she buys something she does 
not want at a mission bazaar. That this thought should have so little influence 
is strange ; but to me it seems still stranger that persons who show so much good 
taste in other matters should be blind to the execrably bad taste of all that kind 
of adornment. A bird’s wing is no doubt a very beautiful thing, and the love of 
such beautiful things is natural and as old as man ; older indeed, for as Mr. 
Herbert Spencer would say, it preceded human evolution ; the bower-bird 
ornaments its bower with bright shells and pretty feathers. But man is higher 
than a bower-bird. He does not admire with his eyes only, but with his mind 
and heart. All things, beautiful or hideous, come to him in a framing of memories 
and associations, and he cannot unframe them. It is a pitiable sort of man of 
whom the poet can say — 
“ A primrose by a river’s brim 
A yellow primrose was to him. 
And it was nothing more.” 
Even the head-hunter of Borneo does not admire his necklace of human teeth 
only for its pearly lustre and beautiful regularity, but for the glory that flashes 
from it, the story which it tells of patient ambush, valiant onslaught, victory, and 
then the neck-severing slash and the gory head rolling on the ground. We have 
learned to think very differently about these things from the savage Dyak, and 
therefore the necklace of human teeth is as ugly to us as it is beautiful to him ; 
but have we not yet something to learn if we can still take pleasure in decorating 
our persons with bits of the corpses of dead birds ? It is true other creatures must 
die that we may live. We cannot feed ourselves without their flesh or clothe 
ourselves without their skins. But good taste prompts us to put out of sight, as 
far as possible, everything that would connect in our minds what we are eating 
or wearing with the life that was the price of it. And what we must see we 
submit to as a necessity, we do not feel pleasure in it. To decorate ourselves 
with the remains of the dead is another thing altogether. I do not speak of 
