extent, like Naaman the Syrian, I have been compelled to bow myself down in the House of Rimmon. Ladies have much to answer for as regards the slaughter of birds. At a certain village on the coast a large trade is still done in shooting the beautiful Terns or Sea-Swallows, and the Kittiwakes, for millinery purposes. Seven boats used to be employed; now, I am glad to say, there are but two. Thanks to the afore-mentioned extension of the close-time, most of the Terns are gone, and the pretty tame little Kittiwakes provide the greatest number of victims. During the third week in October, 1899, 120 were shot in one day, 96 on another, and 60 on the morning of October 30th. Some 360 were shot during the week. A man from London was occupied in skinning the birds, which at this season will keep for about a week. Some 260 birds were hanging up on October 30th, waiting to be skinned. When this operation is over the birds are packed up and forwarded to London. Sixpence apiece is the price paid. Now, I do not blame the men who obtain these birds—they are hard-working, honest fellows, not overburdened with this world's goods—nearly as much as I blame those who employ them, or those who reap the fruit of their labours. Qui facit per alium, facit per se. The men pursue a perfectly legitimate calling, when everyone is free to shoot what they will; but this wholesale destruction of beautiful birds is very grevious, all the more so when one considers that it is perpetrated for the adorning of ladies' hats and bonnets; and I feel sure that if only those ladies who love to adorn themselves with birds' feathers, wings, and bodies knew half the abominable cruelty that is perpetrated, in various parts of the world, at the shrine of the Goddess of Fashion,—feathers plucked out of the living bird, wings torn off while they are yet alive, and the mangled remains thrown back on the salt-water to linger in agony, till death comes as a merciful relief to their sufferings,—they would for ever forswear ornaments purchased at the price of such terrible suffering. With regard to the senseless destruction of those most useful birds, Owls and Kestrels, I am very glad to say that a far more enlightened view obtains at the present day, both with game-preservers and with game-keepers, and it is comparatively seldom that one comes across their mangled remains hanging up in the keeper's "museums." That most excellent and practical ornithologist and lover of birds, the late Lord Lilford, used to say that the man who would shoot an Owl was only fit for a lunatic asylum, and the sheltering ægis of many a landowner is now extended to them. One thing I should like to see entirely abolished by Act of Parliament, and that is that most iniquitous institution known as the "pole-trap." I regard it as a veritable invention of the Evil One, and I make no excuse for having buried dozens of them. They not only catch the various species of Hawks and Owls for which they are set, but I have known Cuckoos, Nightjars, Wheatears, Ring-Ouzels,
