Alas, that the "fair" sex in whom the quality of mercy is supposed to exist in a high degree, should still wear above their serene brows--often bowed in worship--the badge of inhumanity and heartlessness. That mothers who have experienced all the pangs as well as joys of motherhood can aid in breaking up thousands of woodland homes by wearing the plumage which makes the slaughter of these birds one of commercial value and necessity. Soon accounts will be published of the fabulous sums to be gained by the heron hunters, and in order to supply the demand for the filmy, delicate _aigrette_ to adorn my lady's bonnet, the nesting colony of these snowy egrets will be visited by the plume-hunters and the work of slaughter begin. Love and anxiety for their nestlings will render them heedless of danger, and through all the days of carnage which follow, not one parent bird will desert its nest. Fortunately the birds are instantly killed by the bullet, else, stripped of the coveted plumes they will be thrown in a heap, there slowly to die within sight and hearing of their starving, pleading little ones. These have no value for the plume-hunter, and so off he goes with his spoil, leaving thousands of orphaned nestlings to a painful, lingering death. And all this for a plume, which, in these days of enlightenment marks the wearer either as a person of little education, or totally lacking in refinement of feeling. It is trite to say that motherhood no more than womanhood necessarily implies refinement in the individual, but surely in the former, one would, in the nature of things, expect to find engendered a feeling of tender pity for any helpless animal and its offspring. It is this phase of the question which particularly appeals to people in whom love, as well as compassion for _all_ helpless creatures is strong, not a sentiment newly awakened, or adopted as a fad. That genuine love for animals is inherent and not a matter of education the close observer, I think, will admit. Not that a child cannot be brought to recognize, when caught in any act of cruelty to some defenseless creature, the wanton wickedness of his act, but that no amount of suasion can influence him to treat it with kindness for _love's_ sake rather than from the abstract moral reason that it is right.