I sprang from the scherm and ran to my quarry. There he lay, breast downward, his long neck bent and his head concealed under the black, bulky body. The wings were expanded, with the snowy plumes outspread, fanlike, on each side. The bird was stone dead, for the bullet struck the base of the spinal column and shattered it throughout the whole length. No swifter death could have been devised. Carefully, one by one, I plucked out the lovely plumes. They were surely the fairest and purest ornaments ever devised by that influence which men, when the world was young, personified and worshipped as the Goddess of Love,--the noblest concrete expression of that principle which strives to draw sex relations to the higher planes of beauty. And here had I, a decadent human, typical of a neuropathic age, destroyed this exquisite embodied achievement for the purpose of reversing Nature's plan. For I should transfer to the female, to my own woman-kind, adornments developed naturally on the male for the enhancement of his own proper beauty. The female ostrich, in her robe of tender, greyish brown, is attractive enough to her prospective mate without artificial aid. Were she to hang a wisp of human hair about her graceful, undulating neck, she would rightly be regarded as a freak. Schopenhauer was right,--among human beings as among other animals the male is essentially more beautiful than the female; it is the sex-disturbance which confuses our canons. If it were otherwise women would not find it necessary to ransack mineral, vegetable and animal nature for the purpose of enhancing their attractiveness. My plucking came to an end. The long, foamy whites,--the short, glossy blacks whose hue was deeper than that of the raven's wing,--were tied into bundles with twine from my compendious haversack. There lay the huddled, ruined, mangled body; there grinned the already dry and blackened blood-clot defacing the desert's visage. Rifled of its garment of harmonious and appropriate beauty, smitten and smashed into an object of grisly horror,--this piteous sacrifice to woman's callous vanity and the heartless cruelty of her mate seemed to make the wilderness as foul as the altar of Cain. With an effort I passed from the stand-point of a somewhat inconsequent and inconsistent Jekyll to that of a primeval Hyde. From my flask, the contents of which had been carefully preserved intact up to the present, I poured out a libation to the manes of the departed ostrich. Might his freed spirit find refuge in some Elysian wilderness unvexed of prowlers who call chemistry and machinery to the aid of their own physical deficiencies, and slay because slaughter stimulates their debilitated pulses.