back in a day or two,
and you will see her nursing triplets. Meanwhile, hear the ear-piercing
fife of the bridegroom!--Where will you find a set of happier people,
unless perhaps it be in our parlour, or our library, or our nursery?
For, to tell you the truth, there is a cage or two in almost every room
of the house. Where is the cruelty--here, or in your blood-stained
larder? But you must eat, you reply. We answer--not necessarily birds.
The question is about birds--cruelty to birds; and were that sagacious
old wild-goose, whom one single moment of heedlessness brought last
Wednesday to your hospitable board, at this moment alive, to bear a part
in our conversation, can you dream that, with all your ingenuity and
eloquence, you could persuade him--the now defunct and disjected--that
you had been under the painful necessity of eating him with stuffing and
apple-sauce?

It is not in nature that an ornithologist should be cruel--he is most
humane. Mere skin-stuffers are not ornithologists--and we have known
more than one of that tribe who would have had no scruple in strangling
their own mothers, or reputed fathers. Yet if your true ornithologist
cannot catch a poor dear bird alive, he must kill it--and leave you to
weep for its death. There must be a few victims out of myriads of
millions--and thousands and tens of thousands are few; but the
ornithologist knows the seasons when death is least afflictive--he is
merciful in his wisdom--for the spirit of knowledge is gentle--and
"thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," reconcile him to the
fluttering and ruffled plumage blood-stained by death. 'Tis hard, for
example, to be obliged to shoot a Zenaida dove! Yet a Zenaida dove must
die for Audubon's Illustrations. How many has he loved in life, and
tenderly preserved! And how many more pigeons of all sorts, cooked in
all styles, have you devoured--ay, twenty for his one--you being a
glutton and epicure in the same inhuman form, and he being contented at
all times with the plainest fare--a salad perhaps of water-cresses
plucked from a spring in the forest glade, or a bit of pemmican, or a
wafer of portable soup melted in the pot of some squatter--and shared
with the admiring children before a drop has been permitted to touch his
own abstemious lips.

The intelligent author of the "Treatise on British Birds" does not
condescend to justify the right we claim to encage them; but he shows
his genuine humanity in instruct