I am sure this account of the loss of bird life must have seemed appalling to my mother, for I heard her moan sadly when it was talked about.

It was during my stay in the Southern islands that I first saw the white egret, whose beautiful sweeping plumes, like the silken train of a court lady, have so long been the spoils of woman, that the bird is almost extinct.  As these magnificent feathers appear upon the bird only through the mating and nesting season, the cruelty of the act is still more dastardly.  The attachment of the parent birds for their young is very beautiful to witness, yet this devotion, which should be their safeguard, is seized upon for their destruction, for so great is the instinct of protecting love they refuse to leave their young when danger is near, and are absolutely indifferent to their own safety.

Never shall I forget one sad incident which occurred while I was there.  Overhanging the water was an ancestral nest belonging to a family of egrets which had occupied it for some seasons.  Unlike the American human species, in whom local attachment is not largely developed, and who take a new house every moving day, the egret repairs and fixes over the old house year after year, putting in a new brace there, adding another stick here, to make it firm enough to bear the weight of the mother and the three young birds which always comprise the brood.

The three pale-blue eggs in this nest had been duly hatched, and the fond mother was now brooding over her darlings with every demonstration of maternal affection.  She was a beautiful creature with her graceful movement, her train of plumes, and her long neck gracefully curved.

The quick sharp boom, boom of the guns had been echoing through the swamp for some time, and the men were now coming nearer.  The efforts of the poor mother to shield her babies were piteous, but the hunters did not want them.  Their scant plumage is worthless for millinery purposes.  Possibly the mother might have escaped had she been willing to leave her dear ones; but she would not desert them, and was shot in the breast as the reward of her devotion.  The nestlings were left to starve.

Would you think the woman who wore that bunch of feathers on her bonnet could take much pleasure in it?

CHAPTER VIII

THE PRISON

  Like a long-caged bird
  Thou beat’st thy bars with broken wing
  And flutterest, feebly echoing
  The far-off music thou hast heard,
          —­Arthur Eaton.

This was my last day of liberty for many, many months.  The very next evening I was stunned by a stone thrown by a small boy who accompanied a hunter.  Picking me up he ran toward his father, who was coming back from the neighboring swamp with his loaded gamebag.

“This bird isn’t dead,” said the boy, holding me up to view, “and I’m going to put it in a cage and train it to talk.”