At Madame Oiseau Mort's, where I get my millinery, there was another hat I had a notion to take.

It was built up with robins' wings and part of a tern was on it too, I believe--just lovely! but afterward I was glad I didn't buy it, for that decoration is more common.

I counted nine hats in church last Sunday trimmed with gulls.

Of course they were pretty, for a handsome bird makes any hat pretty.
"By the way, Nell, I must tell you something perfectly ridiculous! Do you know papa pretends it's wicked for women to wear birds on their hats or trim their gowns with feather trimming?
Did you ever?
I told him we'd be a mighty sorry-looking set going around like a lot of female Dunkards or Salvation Army women, without a bit of style, and he said those women hadn't the sin on their souls of wearing birds that had been killed on purpose to minister to their vanity; that he'd rather be a peaceful-faced Dunkard woman or Salvationist with her plain bonnet and her gentle heart than a gay society butterfly with her empty head loaded down with dead birds.
"Isn't it perfectly horrid for him to talk like that?
He is such an old fogy in his ideas he actually makes me tired.

Then he went on to say that never again could he believe that women are the tender-hearted creatures they have always been supposed to be, when they show themselves so eager to be decked with the innocent songsters whose lives are sacrificed by the million on the altar of fashion; the men have always been taught that woman's nature was morally superior to theirs, but we'd have to give up this criminal fad which we have persisted in at such a fearful price of bird life before we could be regarded as other than monstrously cruel and bloody.