I saw six ladies' hats trimmed with dead birds. Fastened on sidewise, head downward, on one was a magnificent scarlet tanager, his body half concealed by folds of tulle, his fixed eye staring into vacancy. On another was the head and breast of a beautiful yellow-hammer; it was surmounted by the tall sweeping plumes of the egret, which this bird produces only at breeding time. Oh, how much joy and beauty the world had lost by that cruel deed! A third hat had two song sparrows imprisoned in meshes of star-studded lace. Their blithesome carol had been rudely silenced, their cheer to the world cut short, simply that they might be used for hat trimming. Of the remaining ones some were as yet unknown to me, but my mother, who had an extensive acquaintance with foreign birds, said that in that strange murderous mixture of millinery, far-away Australia had furnished the filmy feathers of the lyre bird which swept upward from a knot of ribbons, and that the forests of Germany had contributed the pretty green linnet. Dove's wings and the rosy breast of the grosbeak completed the barbarous display.
How my heart sickened as I gazed at these pleasant, refined, soft-voiced women flaunting the trophies of their cruelty in the beautiful sunlight.
Had they no compassion for the feathered mother who had been robbed of her young for the sake of a hat?
"Oh, how can they do such dreadful, such wicked things!" I moaned. My mother heard my lament and signaled for us to come up where she was perching.
"You see now who are our worst enemies," said she. "The cat preys on us to satisfy his bodily hunger, but women have no such excuse. We are not slaughtered to sustain their lives but to minister to their vanity. For years the women of Christian lands have waged their unholy war against us. We have been driven from our old haunts and forced to seek new places. We have been shot down by thousands every season until now many species are destroyed from the face of the earth. There is no security for us in any place. The hunter with his gun penetrates into the deepest forests, he perils his life in scaling the most dangerous cliffs, he wades through bog and marsh and mud and tracks us to our feeding grounds to surprise us with the deadly shot, and kills the mother hovering over the nest of her helpless offspring with as little compunction as if she were a poisonous reptile instead of a melodious joy-giver. And all this horrible slaughter is for women."
I grew feverish with excitement at this terrible arraignment of the "gentler sex."
"But why are they so cruel? Why do they do this wicked thing?" I asked.
"For the sake of Fashion," said my mother.
"Fashion, what is that?"
My mother was very patient with me, so when I asked questions she did not put me off by telling me she didn't know, or advise me to fly away and play, or tell me she was busy and couldn't be bothered just then, therefore she now took pains to make me understand.