Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 January 1910 — A MAN WHO HAD COURAGE. [ARTICLE]

A MAN WHO HAD COURAGE.

In St. Ives, in Land’s End, bird killing used to flourish almost without protest. It has not wholly ceased yet, to be sure, but one little incident took place which seems to have been remembered here and there, and to have Drought about a merciful truce. In “The Land’s End” W. H. Hudson relates the occurrence as he heard of It. He was talking one day to a woman who deplored the way her fellow countrymen were killing birds of all kinds. “I’m sure,” she said, “that if some one living here would go about among the people and talk to the men and boys, and not be afraid of anything, but try to get the police and magistrates to help him, he could get these things stopped in time, just as Mr. Ebblethwaite did about the gulls.” Who was Mr. EbbletWaite, and what was it he did about the gulls? I bad been, off and on, a long time in Ihe place, and had talked about the birds with a score of people, without ever hearing this name mentioned. And as to the gulls, they were well enough protected by the sentiment of the flsherfolk.

But it had not been so always. On inquiry, I found twenty persons to tell me all about Mr. Ebblethwaite, who had been very weH known to every-

body ip the town, but a? ne had been dead pome years, nobody bad remembered to'toll me about him. ' It now came out that the very strict protection awarded to the gulls at St. Ives dates back only about fifteen to eighteen years. The fishermen always had a friendly feeling for the birds, as is the case of all the fishing places on the coast, but they did not protect them from persecution, although the chief persecutors were their own children.

People, inatives and visitors, amuse# themselves by shooting the gulls along the cliffs and in the harbor. Harrying the gulls was the popular amusement of the boys; they were throwing stones at them all day long, and caught them with baited hooks, and set gins baited with fish on the sands, and nq person forbade them.

Then Mr. Ebblethwaite appeared on the scene. He came from a town in the north of England, In brbken health, and here he stayed a number of years, living alone in a small house down by the waterside. He was very fond of the gulls and fed them every day; but his example had no effect on others, nor had his words when he went about day after day on the beach, trying to persuade people to desist from these senseless brutalities.

Finally he succeeded in getting a number of boys summoned for cruelty before the magistrates, and although no convictions followed, nor could be obtained, since there was no law or

by-fcw to help him In such- a case, he yet in this indirect way accomplished bis object. He made himself unpopular, and was jeered and denounced as an interfering person, especially by the women; but some of the fishermen now began to pluck up spirit and second his efforts, and in a little while it came to be understood that, law or no law, the gulls must not be persecuted.

That Is what Mr. Ebblethwaite did. For me it was to “say something,” and I have now said it. Doing and saying come to pretty much the same thing. At all events, I have oil this occasion kept Ruskin’s words in mind concerning the futility of prodding and scratching it that thick, insensible crust which lies above the impressible part in men unless we come through tvith a deep thrust somewhere.