plumage, the elegance of his lines. He was one of a dying race--the
descendants of the men who had once killed for food had killed later to
gratify the vanity of women who must have swansdown to set off their
beauty, puffs to powder their noses. No more did great flocks wing an
exalted flight, high in the heavens, or rest like a blanket of snow on
river banks. The old kings were dead--the glassy eyes of the Trumpeter
looked out upon a world which knew his kind no more.

In the other cases were the little birds and big ones--ducks, swimming
on crystal pools, canvas-backs and redheads, mallards and teal;
Bob-whites, single and in coveys; sandpipers, tip-ups and peeps, those
little ghosts of the seashore, shadows on the sand; there were sora and
other rails, robins and blackbirds, larks and sparrows, wild turkeys
and wild geese, all the toll which the hunter takes from field and
stream and forest.

It was in a sense a tragic room, but it had never seemed that to Becky.
She came of a race of men who had hunted from instinct but with a sense
of honor. The Judge and those of his kind hated wanton killing. Their
guns would never have swept away the feathered tribes of tree and sky.
It was the trappers and the pot-hunters who had done that. There had
motored once to the Judge's mansion a man and his wife who had raged at
the brutes who hunted for sport. They had worn fur coats and there had
been a bird's breast on the woman's hat.

The Judge, holding on to his temper, had exploded finally. "If you
were consistent," he had flung at them, "you would not be decked in the
bodies of birds and beasts."

Becky loved the birds in the glass cases, the peeps and the tip-ups,