gic rings of song round his home, and making them thick in
places. It was a musical embodiment of the love of life and of its
joyousness.

The brown thrush is also absent from places where once there were
many. A farmer in this neighborhood states that a few years ago the
treetops near his house seemed to be filled with these fine singers.
Now he hears only one or two during the season. Last May the writer
found three nests at least a mile apart, but they were destroyed
before the time of hatching, and the birds went about silent as if
brooding upon their trouble. It is doubtful if they will build next
season in that vicinity. No doubt the clearing away of the forests and
the settling up of the country are responsible for the scarcity of the
birds in part, but only in part. If they were let alone, many of the
most interesting and useful birds would build near even our city
homes, and our gardens and fields would again become populous with
them.

The wearing of feathers and the skins of birds for ornament is the
chief cause of the final flight of many of our songsters. It is stated
that a London dealer received at one time more than thirty thousand
dead humming birds. Not only brightly colored birds, but any small
birds, by means of dyes, may come at last to such base uses. It is
estimated by some of the Audubon societies that ten million birds were
used in this country in one season. All these bodies, which are used
to make "beauty much more beauteous seem," are steeped in arsenical
solutions to prevent their becoming as offensive to the nostrils of
their wearers as they are to the eyes of bird lovers.

The use of dead birds for adornment is a constant object lesson in
cruelty, a declaration louder than any words that a bird's life is not
to be respected. It is currently reported that a million bobolinks
were destroyed in Pennsylvania alone last year to satisfy the demand
of the milliners. If this "garniture of death" is in good taste, then
our North American Indian in his war paint and feathers was far ahead
of his time.

Let us hope that some oracle of fashion will decree that if the
remains of animals must be used for adornment, the skins of mice and
rats shall be offered up. Their office seems to be principally that of
scavengers, and their gradual but certain extinction would not matter
if the Christian nations should become, _pari passu_, more cleanly.
The squirrel could also be used effectively, mounted as i