ion to Congress, from which, when
I got home, I could not well escape. The result is I have
been here twenty years as Representative and Senator, the
whole time getting a little poorer year by year. If you
think I have not made a good one, you have my full authority
for saying anywhere that I entirely agree with you. During
all this time I have never been able to hire a house in Washington.
My wife and I have experienced the varying fortune of Washington
boarding houses, sometimes very comfortable, and a good deal
of the time living in a fashion to which no mechanic earning
two dollars a day would subject his household. Your "terrapin"
is all in my eye, very little in my mouth. The chief carnal
luxury of my life is in breakfasting every Sunday morning
with an orthodox friend, a lady who has a rare gift for making
fish-balls and coffee. You unfortunate and benighted Pennsylvanians
can never know the exquisite flavor of the codfish, salted,
made into balls and eaten on a Sunday morning by a person
whose theology is sound, and who believes in all the five
points of Calvinism. I am myself but an unworthy heretic,
but I am of Puritan stock, of the seventh generation, and
there is vouchsafed to me, also, some share of that ecstasy
and a dim glimpse of that beatific vision. Be assured, my
benighted Pennsylvania friend, that in that hour when the
week begins, all the terrapin of Philadelphia or Baltimore
and all the soft-shelled crabs of the Atlantic shore might
pull at my trousers legs and thrust themselves on my notice
in vain.

I am faithfully,
GEO. F. HOAR

CHAPTER XXVIII
THE BIRD PETITION

Before the year 1897 I had become very much alarmed at the
prospect of the total extinction of our song-birds. The
Bobolink seemed to be disappearing from the field in Massachusetts,
the beautiful Summer Red Bird had become extinct, and the
Oriole and the Scarlet Tanager had almost disappeared. Many
varieties of songbirds which were familiar to my own boyhood
were unknown to my children. The same thing seems to be going
on in other countries. The famous Italian novelist, Ouida,
contributed an article in the _North American Review_ a few
years ago in which she described the extermination of the
Nightingale in Italy. The Director of the Central Park, in
one of his Reports, stated that within fifteen or twenty years
the song-birds of the State of New York had diminished forty-
five per cent.

One afternoon in