In this one thing the woman is wise in her day and generation. She may be unable to formulate her wisdom; it must, indeed be confessed that she commonly makes a pretty bad attempt at explanation of anything; but she knows a deal more than she knows that she knows. One of the things that she perfectly apprehends is the evanescence of æsthetic gratification, entailing the necessity of infinite variety in the method of its production; and the knowledge of this is power. In countries where the women of one generation adorn themselves as the women of another did, they are slaves, and their bondage, I am constrained to say, is just. Efface the caprices of fashion—let our women look always the same, even their loveliest, and in a few years we should be driving them in harness. If the fowls of the air can serve her in averting the catastrophe, woman is right in employing their artful aid. Moreover—a point hitherto overlooked—it is mostly men who kill the fowls. Urged to its logical conclusion, the argument of the Audubon Society (named in honor of the most eminent avicide of his time) against the killing of song-birds to decorate their betters withal would forbid the killing of the sheep, an amiable quadruped; the fur-seal—extremely graceful in the water; the domestic cow—distinguished for matronly virtues; and the donkey, which, although it has no voice, is gifted with a fine ear and works up well into a superior foreign sausage. In short, we should emancipate ourselves from Nature’s universal law of mutual destruction, and, lest we efface something which has the accidental property of pleasing some of our senses, go naked, feed upon the viewless wind and sauce our privation with the incessant spectacle of song-birds pitching into one another with tigerish ferocity and committing monstrous excesses on bees and butterflies. We need not concern ourselves about “extermination”; the fashion is not going to last long enough for that, and if it threatened to do so the true remedy is not abstention, but breeding. Probably there was a time when appeals were made for preservation of what is now the domestic “rooster”—a truly gorgeous bird to look at. If he had not been good to eat (in his youth) and his wife a patient layer their race would have been long extinct. All that preserves the ostrich is the demand for its plumage. If dead pigs were not erroneously considered palatable there would not be a living pig within reach of man’s avenging arm. Who but for the value of their scalps would be at the trouble and expense of breeding coyotes? Thus we see how it is in the economy of nature that out of the nettle danger the lower animals pluck the flower safety; and it may easily be that the hatbird will owe its life to the profit that we have in its death, and in the flare of the plume-hunter’s gun will “hail the dawn of a new era.” II