O keen glancing eye that can see so far, 
Do you guide your flight by the Northern star? 
The birds from the North are crossing the moon, 
And the Southland knows they are coming soon. 
II 
With gladness and freedom and music gone, 
Another migration is passing on. 
No long, dark lines o’er the face of the moon; 
No dip of wings in the Southern lagoon. 
No sweet, low twitter, no welcoming song; 
These are birds of silence that sweep along. 
Lifeless and stiff, with the death mark on it, 
This fall migration, on hat and bonnet. 
And the crowd goes by, with so few to care 
For this march of death of the fowls of the air. 
A bier for dead birds — has it come to that — 
Must this be our thought of a woman’s hat? 
The slaughter is not so merciless as it was years ago, when 
humming birds and many of our own song birds were used 
for millinery purposes. I remember one of my girl friends — 
she is now an active worker in the Audubon Societies — wore 
a bonnet which was adorned with a semicircle of 15 or 20 
heads of small birds. Two American girls whom I knew who 
were visiting in the Island of Trinidad were each offered as a 
present a cape and muff made entirely of the skins of hum- 
ming birds, a gift which they declined. I give a few statistics 
of the traffic in feathers: Ten tons of ptarmigan wings shipped 
from one place at one time; one London dealer received at 
one time 800,000 pairs of wings, 80,000 water birds, and 
32,000 humming birds; in France electric wires killed 15,000 
nightingales and other species in one season; in one season in 
London the plumage of 195,000 heron was sold. 
Women, however, are not wholly responsible for the 
destruction of bird life. Boys — boys that have not been 
reached by the right kind of an education — have done their 
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