The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-12-04

for moment gain-saying the noble and far reaching work the Animal and Audubon societies have done for the protection of birds, has been greatly and ignorantly maligned in some cases.
 The first room the woman entered was the washing room where she saw more feathers than supposed were in the world. There were scores of inn mense paper bags filled with punches of feathers which had been stripped from geese by the German peasant wo- men and tied into the compact little parcels.
 These great bags are emptied by the girls who string them ready for wash ing. Each girl sits on low chair With an open bag of feathers beside her and a long cord in one hand.
 With the other hand she takes three feathers at a time from one Of the small bundles, which lie before her on a low table, and ties slip nose around the feathers. When she has nine so tied up in threes they are slung over rope stretched in a corner of the room for the washing process.
 The feathers are scrubbed With soap until all of the natural oil is out or them. Then they are rnsed out ana clapped dry by the simple process or tying them to a stick and waving them up and down.
 After that if they are to be left white. they are ready for the steaming kettle. They look like dried sticks af- ter their bath and the steaming process consists in holding. them over the
 Irott1 n ond.
 If they are to be colored they are Wrung out of the rinsing water into the dye pots and afterward clapped dry and steamed. Then they are taken to the next room.
 It was in that next room that the Wo- mans theories came tumolins down all at once. Scores of girls sat at long tables clipping and pasting and sewing and the results of their labors were plumes and breasts that the woman would almost have been ready t" swear had been from beautiful slaughtered birds. The preliminary work ir this de- partment is clipping the feathers With tiny scissors into the shapes demand ed by the girls who do the pasting.
 The pastors are the real artists or the whole establishment. They use feathers of three sizes, the largest an inch and half in length and the smallest so tiny that you can scarcely see them singly. Each paster has narrow strip of muslin folded douple and stitched over slender wires, upon which the feathers are pasted.
 The girls use little steel instrument which at one end is sort of brush and at the other pair of tweezers. The paster daubs some of the rubber paste at her elbow upon the muslin strips and the shaping of the clever im- itation of birds breast is begun.
 The greatest skill Is shown in the finishing touches, which are put on with the feathers so tiny that the girls tweezers can scarcely hold them. But these bits of feathers are pasted over all the others with such artistic in- eenuity that the initiated may smooth down the completed breast with no suspicion that it has not been part of a real bird.
 Not all the feathers used are goose feathers, by any means. Owls. pheas- ants. swans, peacocks, even chickens, contribute their plumage.
 And breasts are not the only things made by the skilful hands of the girls who sit at the long tables. Fumes long and feathery, put together with a skill that defies curious inspection; pompons of wonderful colors and per- feet symmetry, even wings of birds with every pin feather, apparently, in its proper place.
 The girls work with amazing rapid ity. Fifteen breasts a day is not an unusual record. When one realizes that every one of the feathers, great and small, has to be chosen and pasted at exactly the proper angle, and that ev- cry breast is made up of hundreds of feathers, some notion of the pasters' dexterity may be gained.-From the New York Sun.