in man if she smiles and changes the subject when 
told ( The Auk, January, 1897) that Indians are now 
hired to make bleeding heaps of heron carcasses for 
her at the mouth of Magdalena River, California, and 
that she and the shop dealers and plume men fit out sea 
boats to make the lagoons echo with starving bird cries 
on the sea-coast of California and Mexico. 
This is no worse than the rifling by Texans (as seen by 
Mr. G. B. Sennett, Science, February 26, 1886) of all the 
pelican nests on an island in Corpus Christi Bay, to 
boil down the callow young for pelican oil, nor the fact 
that no pass, harbor, or bay settlement on the Texan 
coast fails to mercilessly egg the neighboring sea-birds’ 
nesting-grounds each spring, smashing innumerable 
eggs half hatched or fresh, at any given breeding place 
at the start, to insure fresh and saleable plunder. 
But is the Paris-set hat fashion of the “feathered 
woman,” which, according to Mr. YLudson(London Times, 
October 17, 1893), began in 1868 to 1870, any better ? 
Has the holocaust which he almost despaired of check- 
ing in 1893, abated since? Walk down Chestnut Street 
in 1897 with your eyes open and answer. The charm 
and joy of summer woods, the exquisite poetry of nature, 
its winged music, is sacrificed everywhere. Count the 
herons if you can. A hermit thrush fixed on a hat at 
Allen’s; 9 warblers (wings, legs, and heads) counted 
by Mrs. Robins on one woman’s hat; 2 canary birds 
seen by her on the cap of a baby ; salad birds in a 
window on South Street ; red starts, barn swallows, 
terns, scarlet tanagers, bluebirds on all sides. The 
despicable shame of destroying humming-birds, delight- 
ful as the elves in “Midsummer Night’s Dream” 
fixed upon every store. Ten of their tails in one woman’s 
hat. Duller hued female birds dyed so that you cannot 
recognize them. And above all the shimmering gos- 
samer films of the egret mother proclaiming the persis- 
tent triumph of cruel vanity. Then go to church, and 
hear through the same plumes the sound of the minis- 
ter’s unreproving words, charged with little more con- 
sideration of the subject than a roundabout inference 
from Balaam’s story, “The Fallen Sparrow,” or the 
notion, vouchsafed me by a Washington minister in 
Spain (who approved of bull-fights, horse disembowel- 
ing and all), that the “animals were given us to kill.” 
9 
