One of my brothers was swaying lightly on a little swing below me.  I flew down hastily and placed myself on the next bough, where I could also get a good view of the ladies as they strolled toward us.  They were in a very merry mood and each one seemed striving to say something more arousing than her companions.  Miss Dorothy led the way, her arm linked in that of one of the stranger guests.  Then followed the others with Miss Katie and Marian hand in hand in the rear.  They were all very handsomely dressed, and having just returned from a drive had not yet removed their hats.

As they came under the tree where we were perched, which was a favorite spot with Miss Katie, they halted for some time and consequently I had an excellent opportunity to look, as my mother had bidden me.

And what did I see?

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.”