FASHION’S HOLOCAUST. 
By HENRY C. MERCER, 
Curator of the Department of American and Prehistoric Archeology, at 
the University of Pennsylvania. 
Published for the Audubon Society of Pennsylvania. 
What New Woman, what patroness of Civic Club or 
New Century Drawing-room, will care to hear reiterated 
the pitiful truth pertaining to the egret (white heron) 
plumes that she has worn, and continues to wear in 
spite of all protest. 
Ten years ago, to the glory of “ Assemblies ” and 
“ Patriarchs,” one Lechevallier (see Mr. W. E. D. Scott 
in The Auk for April, 1887) built a cabin at the Great 
Maximo heron nesting-place in West Florida, where the 
sky had been dark with winged clouds whose beauty 
Virgil sung and the Japanese artist delights to paint, 
and in four nesting seasons slaughtered or drove off all. 
With repeating rifles and guns chosen for the work, 
he killed one by one ethereal parents, whose instinct 
brought them hovering back to the trees where their 
young cried from the nests, and their mates in wedding 
plumes lay bleeding. He tore the white feathers from 
their backs, heads, and breasts, and threw the bleed- 
ing carcasses in heaps to the blow-flies. Vultures 
hovered over the nestlings as their voices grew 
weak, until they turned black in the sun, or their 
struggling forms fell from the tree-tops to confront his 
steps in the mud. For weeks and months his guns 
cracked, until the work for fair women ceased to 
“pay.” Having outdone the blood-letting mink and 
shamed the voracious wolverine, having destroyed 
countless egrets, ibises, spoonbills, and herons, who, for 
love of starved nestlings and abandoned eggs had 
perished in their honeymoon, he moved his cabin, 
and tried Papys Bayou, Rocky Creek, or Big Sarasota. 
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