ulls. Of course they were pretty, for a handsome
bird makes any hat pretty.

"By the way, Nell, I must tell you something perfectly ridiculous! Do
you know papa pretends it's wicked for women to wear birds on their
hats or trim their gowns with feather trimming? Did you ever? I told
him we'd be a mighty sorry-looking set going around like a lot of
female Dunkards or Salvation Army women, without a bit of style, and he
said those women hadn't the sin on their souls of wearing birds that
had been killed on purpose to minister to their vanity; that he'd
rather be a peaceful-faced Dunkard woman or Salvationist with her plain
bonnet and her gentle heart than a gay society butterfly with her empty
head loaded down with dead birds.

"Isn't it perfectly horrid for him to talk like that? He is such an
old fogy in his ideas he actually makes me tired. Then he went on to
say that never again could he believe that women are the tender-hearted
creatures they have always been supposed to be, when they show
themselves so eager to be decked with the innocent songsters whose
lives are sacrificed by the million on the altar of fashion; the men
have always been taught that woman's nature was morally superior to
theirs, but we'd have to give up this criminal fad which we have
persisted in at such a fearful price of bird life before we could be
regarded as other than monstrously cruel and bloody. However, he
prophesied that the fashion can't continue much longer anyway, because
there soon won't be any birds left, and then, he says, we'll have a
world without its sweetest music. It will be hushed by the folly of
woman.

"Oh, Nell, don't you dislike to have anybody lecture you like that? It
makes one feel so uncomfortable. I don't suppose it's so very wrong to
wear bird trimming or our minister's wife wouldn't do it. You know her
black velvet hat with that big bird on it with the red points on the
wings, is one of the most striking hats that come to church. And her
feather muff is so elegant, awfully expensive too. And what would her
hat look like without that bird on it, I'd like to know? So if it
isn't wicked for her it isn't wicked for us, Nell, and I'm not going to
give up looking nice just to please papa. He'd like to have me dress
as antiquated as old Mrs. Noah when she came out of the ark, but I'm
not going to encourage him in his old-fashioned notions. And here,
Nell, just listen to this! Don't you think, he says t