"I like the hat," said a gentle-looking little lady in a fashionable millinery establishment the other day, "but," removing it from her head, "those blackbirds must be removed and flowers put in their place."
"A member of the Audubon Society, probably," queried the attendant, respectfully.
"No," was the answer, "but for years the birds have been welcome visitors at our country place, great flocks of blackbirds, especially, making their homes in our trees. This year, and indeed the last, but few appeared, and we have in consequence no love for the hunters and little respect for the women who, for vanity's sake, make their slaughter one of commercial necessity and greed."
'Tis said fashion is proof against the appeals of common sense or morality, and one must accept the statement as true when, in spite of all that has been said upon the subject, the Paris journals announce that "birds are to be worn more than ever and blouses made entirely of feathers are coming into fashion." The use of bird skins in Paris for one week represent the destruction of one million three hundred thousand birds; in London the daily importation ranges from three hundred to four hundred thousand. It is honestly asserted that, in the height of the season, fifty thousand bird skins are received in New York City daily.
At the annual meeting of the Audubon Society of New York state a letter was read from Governor Roosevelt in which he said that he fully sympathized with the purpose of the society and that he could not understand how any man or woman could fail to exert all influence in support of its object.
"When I hear of the destruction of a species," he added, "I feel just as if all the works of some great writer had perished; as if one had lost all instead of only a part of Polybius or Livy."
Rev. Dr. Henry Van Dyke sent a letter in which he said the sight of an aigrette filled him with a feeling of indignation, and that the skin of a dead songbird stuck on the head of a tuneless woman made him hate the barbarism which lingers in our so-called civilization. Mr. Frank M. Chapman, at the same meeting, stated that the wide-spread use of the quills of the brown pelican for hat trimming was fast bringing about the extinction of that species.
In front of my pew sits a maiden—
A little brown wing in her hat,
With its touches of tropical azure,