The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1912-01-30
A British BenediCtion

l
 California has at last acquired Afri-
 can ostrich feather industry For
 thirty years English money, time and
 effort have been put into this profit ! able business in California. A dozen | English ostrich farmers have sunk ! their fortunes and wrecked their lives | in the attempt to endow the Ameri- i can republic with the African ostrich and at last success has perched upon
 their banners, and now the field is | occupied by the Americans, while the remaining English victors in the fight ! have retired to the seclusion of their | English monarchy there to spend the | millions of dollars made out of Amer | jean women in this interesting and | decorative form of commerce.
 I, In 1882 the first Englishman ar l ostricheS: he wandered up and down l the Golden State trying to vend his ostriches and feathers in vain: at l length he was introduced to some Sheriff in some County of California and his African ostriches vended to various students of natural history to pay the debts he owed employees. The fame of his arrival had been herald ed by the American press all over the land, so that other worthy English be- came enthused on the subject and ! American sanatarium a suitable hab- | fiat for the African ostrich; they also saw countless fortunes made by vend- ing American ostrich feathers to | American women, for they knew that the love of this class of finry was as
 strong in America as 1t is in Eng land.
 | The next British hero accompanied | to this country by African ostricheS
 sunscorched areas of Fallbrook, vil- ! lage in Southern California: weary Of | the eternal sunlight and Arab bian ! landscape he turned over his ornitho- | logical assets to a couple of show
 men, or menagerie proprietors, one
 named HagenbacE,. who resides in Germany and another at San Diego.
 Three more unfortunate Englishmen endowed with philanthropic ostrich ideas arrived in the land and started ostrich farms near Los Angeles: their ] bones financially speaking cover the | slopes of the sundried mesas ot Southern California, one of them
 wearying of Egyptian life discharged a gun into his interior and Is now
 sleeping beneath. grass guaranteed by
 the cemetery authorities to be kept
 eternally wet.
 was no ostrich farmer at all, but
 young English college man, who had
 respectable connections in England
 and belonged to the class that exists | just below the aristocracy and above
 the shop-keepers; he brought fifty
 birds from Africa just in time, for a ! few days after he left the shores of
 the Dark Continent, the local au- 1 thorities imposed a duty of five hun ! dred dollars each on every bird taken from the land. He was independent ! of American patronage and cared not whether the chamois-colored Califor- mia women purchased his ostrich
 so numerous in California known as l remittance men," who decorate the l landscape with their presence and pass the time in playing golf, tennis, polo, cricket, varying these amuse-
 ments by frequent acquisition of ! whiskey and soda as restoratives- For | thirteen years this self banished Eng fish aristocrat remained like John the | Baptist in the wilderness, isolated
 from the world and exciting the sym pathy of the ignorant American TUT als by h;s pursuit of the strange os- | trich business. Money was common | to be made out of hogs, but whoever | of os+riches. Year in and year out | he adjourned to the little village post | office a mile or two away and re- ! ceived his European mail fre1ghted l with the precious remittances, which 1 he fed to his oStriches and family. In | the year 1900 the angel of the Lord appeared to him in dream, so to
 speak, and bade him appeal to the | uncounted patriotic American women
 of the land to support the American | ostrich, to wear it's feathers and mn ally thus to destroy forever the profits
 that the English have been making 1 out of Americans for the past hfty years in the ostrich feather trade.
 The response was instant and most 1 gratifying: over the rugged noun tains and sterile plains began to ow | a stream of gold equal to that which startled the Argonauts in 49 1n Northern California. The last of the
 unfortunate English ostrich farmers i saw his financial salvation and knew that he was to become as illustrious 1 a. any other money-crowned king of the Golden State. For five years he piled up the American gold eagerly l contributed by the American women and then set sail for the seat of inn perial government, forever shaking the adobe dust of the land of the 1 free and the home of the brave from
 his aristocratic feet. He left stock company to conduct his immense