texture that an experienced bird'snester can tell by feeling alone, before he sees them, the nature of the prize he has reached at the bottom of a hole.

The names of animals which have a distinctive cry are almost always onomatopoeic; that is to say, they imitate more or less successfully the cry. And the cries of the owl in its various species are so strange, and, heard as they generally are at dead of night, they take such strong hold of the imagination, that, one might be sure beforehand that they would receive among various peoples many apt or sonorous names. Such names, to take only a few from the vocabularies of widely scattered nations, without distinguishing the species, are the σк, the γλαύξ, the νυκτικόραξ (nightraven) of the Greeks; the strix, the bubo, the ulula of the Romans; the kôs, the kippôz, the yamshooph of the Hebrews; the hibou of the French; the hornugle or strougle of the Danes, the Swedes, and the Norwegians; the bufo or mofo of the Portuguese; the allocco of the Italians; and, best perhaps of all, the bu-ru-ru of the Arabs. The white owl screeches, snaps, snorts, snores, squawks, hisses; but it is now, I think, established that he never hoots. He utters his piercing shrieks chiefly when he is on the wing in the gloaming. The other sounds proceed generally, I believe, from the young brood of different ages while they are still in the nest or perching on the branches hard by, and when, in the owl-light, they are about to make some of their earliest essays at flight. Little wonder is it that country folk, hearing in the dusk this uncanny medley of strange noises proceeding from an ivied tower or a primeval oak or beech, should hear them with something akin to awe, and should regard the appearance and the cry of the bird from which it comes-as it has

more or less at all times and places, and in every species of literature, been regarded as the harbinger of calamity, of disease, and of death.

The interest attaching to the actual habits of the owl as we know him now, is not lessened, it is enhanced, by knowing a little of what man has thought about him in former times and how he has treated him.

"Out on ye owls," says the usurping murderer, King Richard the Third, to the messengers who, one after another, like the messengers to Job, bring him in ever fresh tidings of deserved danger, desertion, and disaster

Out on ye owls, nothing but songs of death.

The Hebrew prophet pictures with patriotic agony his native city Jerusalem, with patriotic pride her oppressor Babylon, given over to be habitedas, indeed, it still is, and as places like Jericho, Petra, Baalbek, Palmyra are -by owls and by what he regards as their proper associates:

Their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. . . the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it . . . and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls . . . and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest. There shall the great owl make her nest, and lay, and hatch, and gather under her

shadow: there shall the vultures also be gathered, every one with her mate.'

When Herod Agrippa entered the Theatre at Cæsarea clad, as the Jewish historian Josephus puts it, in a robe of silver tissue, on which the sun shone down with all his radiance, it was an owl which suddenly perched upon a rope above his head and

Isaiah xiii. 21 and xxxiv. 11-15.

warned him of his coming end-the end which had befallen the Syrian conqueror Antiochus Epiphanes, the Roman Sulla, and his own ancestor Herod the Great-the most terrible of all deaths, that of being devoured alive by worms, "the tyrant's death." The owl fares ill, too, in Classical countries and throughout Classical literature. Athens, indeed, was an exception, for the "little passerine owl," which is much more lively and active in his motions than others of his species, and was so common there that "owls to Athens" became as proverbial an expression as our "coals to Newcastle," was regarded as the sacred bird of Athena

Athena's solemn snapping fowls

-and its figure was stamped on the silver coins of the country, which were called for that reason "owls of Laurium." More than this, the goddess herself is believed to have been sometimes represented with an owl's head, the true meaning, it is now surmised, of the famous Homeric epithet for her. But if Athens was an exception to the general prejudices about the owl, it was only an exception which proved the rule. "Loathsome," "moping," "unclean," "ill-omened"-such are the stock epithets which are applied to it. It was an owl, as Virgil sings, that, perching upon the housetop at Carthage, predicted the desertion, the desolation, the death of Dido. It was an owl that, amongst other portents, predicted the death of Cæsar.

self, and by flitting with shrieks before the face, and by flapping with her wings upon the shield, of the illfated Turnus, paralyzed him with terror, just as he was about to enter on his final conflict with Eneas, for the plighted hand of Lavinia.

No incantation in mediæval times was deemed likely to be successful unless the "boding owl" shrieked assent. The "owlet wing" was as potent an ingredient as the blind worm's sting or the nose of Turk or Tartar's lips in the hell-broth of the witches' caldron on Forres Heath. And when the deed of darkness was all but perpetrated in Macbeth's castle upon the sleeping Duncan,

It was the owl that shrieked; a fatal bellman

Which gives the stern'st good-night.

Perhaps the peculiar shape of the white owl's face-heart-shaped when he is awake, elongated and thinner when he is asleep, and only becoming round, like other owls, after he is dead -marked him out for special suspicion and dislike. He perished almost as much for his supposed virtues as for his supposed vices. Different parts of his body were believed to possess different magical powers; and, strangely enough, the very same organ was believed to possess different powers at different times. His heart if carried into battle acted as a charm, inspiring valor and averting danger; while if laid on the heart of a sleeping man, it caused him to divulge his secrets. The magnificent snowy owl, sometimes a visitant to England, but whose proper habitat is the eternal snows of the north, was supposed to possess peculiar powers of prophecy. In the most solemn assemblies of the North American Indians it is said that the priest or medicine-man conceals his own head and shoulders within the

head and skin of the snowy owl. It is perhaps a fitting garb for the seer to whose prophetic insight the stirring present is not more visible than the remote past and the dim and distant future.

In Morocco the Jews and Arabs, who hate and differ from each other in almost every other respect, agree in their belief about the owl. They believe that the owl is the bird of Satan, and that his shriek causes the death of infants-a catastrophe they strive to avert by reiterated curses or by copious libations of water in the courts of their houses." And Ovid, who in his Fasti describes the leading characteristics of the owl in two lines as well as they ever have been describedGrande caput; stantes oculi; rostra apta rapinæ;

Canities pennis, unguibus hamus adest

-goes on to tell us, in curious agreement with the superstitions of Morocco, how, in ancient times at Rome, it was believed that witches were able by their magic arts to transform themselves into screech owls, or screech owls to transform themselves into witches, and that, entering the window of the nursery in which young infants were asleep, they sucked their lifeblood, as they lay in their cradles. Little wonder that, with such sins laid to its charge, an unlucky owl which blundered into a Roman house was nailed, alive and struggling, to the house door, to avert the evil that it would have wrought.

of a game-preserver of the present day one whit less stupid or less cruel when, in spite of our better knowledge, he allows his gamekeeper to set a trap upon a pole for anything and everything that he is pleased to call "winged vermin," leaving often the unfortunate owl-whose characteristic it is while in pursuit of his prey to perch upon any solitary post of vantage that presents itself-to perish there by inches, with head downwards, in unutterable agonies, and then pays him so much per head for the ghastly trophies of his murderous skill, nailed, if not, as the Romans did, to the door of his house, at least to an adjoining gibbet? The curious use made, on one occasion, of one of these barbarous trophies-but little thanks to the murderer for it-may be mentioned here. A swallow fashioned her clay and straw-built nest, laid her eggs, and hatched her young, on the skeleton, and between the wings, of a luckless barn owl, which had been nailed to a rafter, as if in cruel mockery, in its own barn.

Curiously enough, the owl is as unpopular amongst birds as he is the victim of prejudice, ignorance, superstition, cruelty amongst men. He seems to be under a ban. "There is some sad secret," well says Mr. Evans in his volume on The Songs of Birds, "which we do not know, which no bird has yet divulged to us, and which seems to have made him an outcast from the society of birds of the day. He is branded with perpetual infamy."

Not a bird of the forest e'er mates with him,

All mock him outright by day, But at night, when the woods grow still and dim,

The boldest will shrink away."

Quoted by H. G. Bull in "Notes on the Birds of Herefordshire," p. 110.

Should he be disturbed by any accident from his resting-place by day, he is straightway mobbed by a motley crowd of clamorous birds-rooks, starlings, missel-thrushes, song-thrushes, blackbirds. He sits stock-still amongst them; his eyes dazed by the light; his ears deafened by their cries; his feelings outraged, we may well believe, by their insults. "Hit him hard; he has no friends," seems to be their maxim. He flies blundering from tree to tree, unable to shake off his persecutors, who do not cease to molest him till he can find a hollow tree to hide himself from their view, or till the shades of evening make him once more at home.

One more proof, if such be needed, may be given here that the barn owl, if other birds are enemies to him, is no enemy to them. What was once thought to be the most damning evidence against him turns out, on further investigation, to be the clearest testimony in his behalf. It has long been known that he sometimes selects for his habitation one of those picturesque dovecotes which are among the chief charms of the old-world manor houses of England, and no meaner an observer than Gilbert White was inclined to put down the wholesale destruction of the young pigeons within it to this self-invited guest. Не осcupied, it was thought, one niche in the columbarium that he might feed freely on the young occupants of the adjoining niches! But another observer of Nature, Waterton (who will always be remembered with gratitude by lovers of birds for the protection which, on the principle-the only true principle of "live and let live," and of so preserving the balance of Nature, he gave on his own estate to those interesting and beautiful birds of prey, such as hawks and magpies, which were persecuted elsewhere), showed by careful observation of his own dove

cote, which a pair of barn owls had adopted as their own, that "the saddle had been laid on the wrong horse." From the moment that he was able to exclude rats from his dovecote there was no further massacre of the innocents; and, henceforward, both barn owls and pigeons lived, and laid their eggs, and hatched and reared their young, as members of one happy family. Pigeons do not mob the barn owl who lives amongst them, because they know him well. Other birds do mob him, because, being a bird of night and quite unlike themselves, they hardly know him at all. A boy at school who is quite unlike other boys, who takes a line of his own, and has higher interests than those of athletics, is too often likely to be dubbed as "mad," and to have a bad time of it among his companions; and birds, in this particular, are not much ahead of boys.

It is a little hard upon a bird so aloof and inoffensive as the owl, so often molested by other birds. and so seldom molesting them in return, that it should have been selected by Tennyson as a type of the critics whom he affected to despise, and yet whom he too often allowed to make his life a burden to him:

While I live, the owls;
When I die, the GHOULS.

From the arch enemy of the rat I pass once more to the rats themselves, that I may relate a curious experience of my own, of a few years ago, near my present home. One advantage of the cycle of the day to those who care for Nature as well as for the extent of ground which they can cover, is the way in which it enables its rider to steal quietly on the wild creatures which he loves to watch. He may pass, noticing but quite unnoticed, and pause as he passes, within a few feet of the hare, the rabbit, or the weasel,

of a covey of partridges, of a flock of wood-pigeons, of a family of magpies, and watch them at their ease and his own. I was tricycling homeward one evening from the village of Puddletown, near Dorchester, when I saw passing slowly across the lane in front of me, down one steep bank and up another, a creature which at first completely puzzled me. It had long, shaggy, grizzled hair, and everything about it betokened extreme old age. Its long hair, it may well be, made it appear at the time bigger than it really was, and, for the moment, I thought it must be a species of polecat. I now believe it to have been a rat, but a Nestor among rats-a Nestor who had lived, like its prototype, through some three generations of its kind. I stopped my tricycle short, wondering what this strange creature could be. It was closely followed by an ordinary rat, and then as though it were the Pied Piper of Hamelin, by another and another, and yet another, sometimes singly, sometimes in twos or threes. I watched for some time the ragged regiment till there was a pause in it, and then, dismounting, gently stirred the tufts of long grass or clumps of nettles on the bank whence it came. They concealed, nearly every one of them, a rat or a mouse. The bank was alive with them. With a stick I could have killed a dozen or more. They were evidently migrating in a body, as it is known that they sometimes do, and as their congener, the lemming, does, on an enormous scale and in the most mysterious circumstances, in Norway, till they plunge into the sea by thousands, and so, of their own free motion, redress the balance of Nature.

Cyclops' cave downwards, to have some sort of government amongst themselves. There is generally a bull that lords it over the herd, a ram that leads the flock, a stag that is the monarch of the glen. Bees have, of course, their queen; and it is not the lusty and the dashing, but the ragged-winged and, as Tennyson describes it,

The many-wintered crow which leads the clanging rookery home.

Why should not rats who take up their abode in some sort of community in an old country house, in a barn, in a rickyard, and who have, as Frank Buckland has shown, very considerable intelligence of their own, also "have a king and officers of sorts"? Why should they not choose the oldest and most experienced of their number to be their "guide, philosopher and friend"? I looked over the hedge into the field from which the procession had descended, and saw there a lot of cornstacks, with a threshing-engine, which, with all its paraphernalia,

ready for use on the next morning, had apparently just arrived. My theory is that the uncanny creature was a "king of the rats," that the "eye of old experience" had taught him that the appearance of a threshing-engine was the prelude to disaster and massacre on the morrow, and that he gave, in right of his office, the signal to be off. If, as is well known, rats instinctively quit in a body an unseaworthy vessel before she puts out on her last voyage, if they quit a crazy tenement which is about to fall from lapse of time, or which, like the house of Eugene Aram, is pre-doomed by the guilt long successfully buried within it, but now on his wedding-morning to be revealed,' why should they not quit a rick under the guidance of per

See Bulwer Lyton's"Eugene Aram," Book V. ch. I.