FFIVE hundred invitations were sent out for a novel reception by the Wisconsin Audubon Society a while ago. One of the directors lent a large, handsome house, and six milliners were invited to send hats unadorned with aigrettes or birds. Ostrich plumes, quills and cock's-tails were not disbarred. Twenty-five other milliners applied for space, "everybody" went, and a great many tastefully trimmed hats were sold. People who had never before heard of the Audubon Society became, through the newspaper reports of the affair, greatly interested in its object, and the society itself greatly encouraged through the fact that by their hats and bonnets many of the "best" people of Milwaukee were ready to proclaim it no longer good form to wear the plumes or bodies of wild birds.

"Certificates of heartlessness," a writer in Our Dumb Animals calls them and we know of no better appellation to apply. Women of fashion, says the same writer, have been urged to use the power which they possess—and it is a power greater than that of law—to bring this inhumanity to an instant stop. The appeals for the most part were in vain. Birds continue to be slaughtered by millions upon millions, simply for the gratification of a silly vanity of which intelligent women should be ashamed. Whole species of the most beautiful denizens of field and forest, woodland and shore, have been almost or quite exterminated. Song birds have been driven further and further from the dwellings of men; our country is stripped of one of its least costly and most charming delights and all that women may deck themselves in conformity with a fad.

A bill for the protection of birds was passed on March 24, by the Senate of the United States, introduced into the House of Representatives on March 25, and referred to the Committee on Agriculture. It is entitled "An Act for the Protection of Song Birds."

We confess, says the same writer, to a feeling of humiliation when reading this bill, because it seems a just indictment of the women of America on a charge of willful, wanton, reckless inhumanity. That such legislation should be made necessary, through vanity alone, ought in our estimation, to bring the blush of shame to every good woman's cheek.

"I didn't think," is the usual reply of the fair sex, when approached on the subject. "I didn't think." Aye you didn't think, but that plea can no longer avail when press and pulpit, in the name of humanity, so earnestly and eloquently plead with you to spare the birds.

If compassion for the little creature whose life went out in agony, to supply that ornament above your brow does not move you to abstain from wearing such in the future, then the knowledge that some of the "best" people in the country consider it "bad form," perhaps will.

—E. K. M.