steps of their agents and hear the starvelings cry as they 
tumble from the nests and turn black in the sun ? Dare 
they watch the vultures as they soar for miles over the 
putrid nests ? Not, it seems, until their plume hunters 
have brought the crow and the vulture, the raccoon and 
the blow-fly, upon all fair heron-life at its honeymoon will 
they be satisfied. In the West their longing for feathers 
will not desert them, as it did not in Florida, where, by 
1886, they had exiled the immense clouds of helpless 
birds, or exterminated them, eggs, young, and all, 
that perished at the great nesting-grounds of Papys 
Bayou, Double Branches, Rocky Creek, Bullfrog River, 
Casey’s Pass, Kettle Harbor, Charlotte Harbor, Big Sara- 
sota, Maximo, and Matchla Pass. Now the work seems 
done in the land of flowers. Their Lechevalliers and 
Wilkersons have gone West to fill woman’s orders there, 
where the Ornithologists’ Union is now helplessly try- 
ing to urge the Mexican Governor of Lower Califor- 
nia to stop the slayers, as it seems nothing can stop their 
patronesses. 
We can see by Mr. W. E. D. Scott’s account (in The 
Auk, April, July, and October, 1897) that the women 
of Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, or Washington, 
our sisters, cousins, friends, paid Batty to hire Leche- 
vallier and others to do a hundred times more than this 
in Florida ten years ago, and we can be sure that where 
the birds exist they are doing it still. How many women 
heard the story of the egrets in 1889 from American and 
English newspapers, from the ornithologists, from Hu- 
mane and Audubon Societies? It has been brought to 
their attention by leaflets and dinned into their ears by 
friends. Browing assailed the cruel vanity. Champions 
of humanity have proclaimed the shame on both sides 
of the water, until four years ago Mr. W. H. Hudson, 
the English naturalist, in a protest ( London Times, 
October 17, 1893), well-nigh gave up in despair. They 
listen as the daughter of Pere Goriot listened, who tried 
on a dress while her father died. Let no poet wonder 
at the fair whiteness of a heron again. Let the watery 
woods grow wearisome. In vain the coaxings, the ap- 
peals, the inducements; in vain the description of 
wedding victims. Let the nestlings scream. Leche- 
vallier or no Lechevallier, humanity or no humanity, 
egret plumes they will have, more and more and more, 
