"Oh, miss," said Betty, stepping briskly into the room, nothing loath to accept the invitation to examine the new furs, "they lives out in the wild woods--these little critters, an' men poisons 'em, an' traps 'em. An' when they is dead, they skins 'em, tans the skins, an' makes 'em up into muffs, an' boas, an' tippets, an' fur coats, an' so forth, an' so forth."
"Poison and trap them!" I cried, "doesn't that make the little creatures suffer?"
"Yes, miss, ain't it awful?" returned Betty, making a wry face. "They's a book just been throwed in at the door to-day telling all as to how it is done. The American Humane Association has wrote the book--_they_ don't approve of killin' things. I'll bring it up an' let you read it."
Suiting the action to the thought Betty rushed away down to the kitchen for the book.
She returned in a few moments with a small pamphlet, and thrust it hastily into my hand--my aunt was calling her--and hastened away.
I glanced down at a picture on the front page--a hare caught by the hind leg in a trap. A most agonised expression was on the little animal's face. Below the picture was the title of the story, "_The Cost of a Skin_." I dropped into a rocking-chair and read the story:
"Furs are luxuries, and it cannot be said in apology for the wrongs done in obtaining them that they are essential to human life. Skins and dead birds are not half so beautiful as flowers, or ribbons, or velvets, or mohair. They are popular because they are barbaric. They appeal to the vulgarians. Our ideas of art, like our impulses, and like human psychology generally, are still largely in the savage state of evolution. No one but a vulgarian would attempt to adorn herself by putting the dead bodies of birds on her head, or muffling her shoulders in grinning weasels, and dangling mink-tails. Indeed, to one who sees things as they are, in the full light of adult understanding, a woman rigged out in such cemeterial appurtenances is repulsive. She is a concourse of unnecessary funerals; she is about as fascinating, about as choice and ingenious in her decorations, as she would be, embellished with a necklace of human scalps. She should excite pity and contempt. She is a pathetic example of a being trying to add to her charms by high crimes and misdemeanours, and succeeding only in advertising her indifference to feeling.