Revolter

Lecturing in Brooklyn's Institute of Arts & Sciences, Wallace Havelock Robb, poet and ornithologist of Ontario, who likes to call himself "the St. Francis of Canada, the poet of birdland," showed stereopticon pictures of his conquests over birds. Of a mother plover with her brood of four sitting on his hand, he said: "There is perfect faith there. Don't ask me how I do it. I don't know, and I can't explain. In my sanctuary all the birds . . . know me now, but that plover didn't know me. She just trusted me.

"My theory is that there is a human aureola. Birds watch my eye, and my face, nothing else. This leads me to believe that there is an effulgence, an emission of light from the human face, and that birds can judge our intentions by the quality of that light.

"The whole of humanity has had a wrong conception of the bird of prey. Now take Shakespeare. He used the owl to create tragedy and gloom. That sort of thing made the public associate the owl with a graveyard, but I'm wiping all that out. I am sort of the Walt Whitman of Canada, although not so risque, as I deal with birds. . . ."

Wearing a purple-piped shirt open to the waist. St. Francis Robb said, "I'm a revolter. When you have a shirt cut as low as that, you have to have something in back of it, so I wear a white vest under it. Then I put a . . . purple silk sash about my waist. The women all fall in love with it at once and it is the envy of all men."

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