The majority of his friends, like himself, lead their short, bustling, bumptious, and frequently wholly useless lives, purblind always and entirely deaf where anything except their own interests is concerned. They think but very rarely of anything except themselves, and the competitions, ambitions, or jealousies which occupy them. But in their pastimes cruelty is to them acceptable; it is an outlet for the barbarian who sleeps in them, heavily drugged but not dead; the sight of blood titillates agreeably their own slow circulation. Between them, and the cad who breaks the back of the bagged rabbit, there is no difference except in the degree of power to indulge the slaughter-lust. Alas! it were easier 'to quarry the granite rock with razors' than to touch the feelings of such as this man, or this woman, where their vanities, or their mere sheep-like love of doing as others do, are in question. Princesses wear osprey tufts and lophophorus wings, and so society wears them too, and cares not a straw by what violence and wickedness they are procured; as the ladies, who attend their State concerts, sleep none the worse when in their country houses because the rabbit screams in the steel gins, and the hawk struggles in the pole trap, in the woods about their ancestral houses, and have no less appetite for luncheon amongst the bracken or the heather because shot and bleeding creatures lie half dead in the game bags around, or because the stag often is stretched in his dead majesty before their eyes. Why, then, should they care because in far distant lands little feathered creatures, lovely as flowers, innocent as the dew and the honey they feed on, are killed by the thousands and tens of thousands because a vulgar and depraved taste demands their tender bodies? What does it matter to them that, through their demands, the bird of paradise has become so rare that, unless stringent measures be taken at once, it will be soon totally extinct, and the golden glory of its plumes will gleam no more in tropical sunlight? What does it matter to them that the herons in all their various kinds, the osprey, the egret, the crane, the ibis, are scarcely seen now in the southern and middle States of America, and, when seen, are no longer together in confident colonies, as of yore, but nesting singly and in fear? 'Practically all our heronries are deserted. The birds have been slaughtered for their plumes,' writes a physician[12] dwelling in the Delaware valley. 'What were common birds in their season half a century ago are now rarely seen. The struggle for existence has been a violent one and the herons have been worsted. Scarcely a word of protest has been heard, and none that has been effectual.' Women of the world know this, or at least have been told it fifty times; but it makes no impression on them. They will wear osprey-aigrettes as long as any are left in commerce, and they think a humming-bird looks so pretty in their hair. What else matters?