Are you, lady, particeps criminis?
ONE million bobolinks killed in one year! That bare statement has a throb of pity in it for those to whom sunny meadows and the song and perfume of the fields have a certain charm, which the money market lacks. It hardly needs the dependent statement that the million were killed to adorn women's bonnets—certainly, it requires no reflections upon the vanity and cruelty of the tender-hearted sex to point the futility of the sacrifice. Such reflections are too obvious, and, when made, belong too entirely with other details of the moral code the neglect of which seems a necessary consequence of the ease with which they are accepted. Everybody knows that it is cruel to massacre birds; everybody knows that the massacre is due to women's adoption of fashion. Having been large-minded enough to grant this, why should everybody be troubled further? But Robert of Lincoln has won his own place in a good many hearts, and personal attachments are harder to put aside than moral obligations. We can not think of a million of him being slain in one year with quite the same calmness with which we admit that it is tyrannous, having a giant's strength, to use it like a giant; there are too many pictures before our eyes of riotous brilliancy of buttercups and daisies, heavy grasses swaying in the golden sunlight beneath the weight of a gay, live creature. Gayly dressed,
Wearing a bright black wedding coat,
White are his shoulders and white his crest, while in our ears sounds the bubbling song of the
"Braggart and prince of braggarts,
Pouring boasts from his little throat." Decidedly it takes too much shine and melody out of the world not overstocked with them to silence one million of those insouciant, confident little throats in one year.—Hartford Courant.