and
mice. The barn, or screech, owl, which is found over a great part of
Europe and Asia and also in America, was once very common in Britain,
inhabiting every "ivy-mantled tower," church steeple, barn loft, hollow
tree, or dovecot, in which it could get a lodging. But it was never
welcome. Like the Jews in the days of King John it has been relentlessly
persecuted by superstition, ignorance and avarice. Avarice, instigated
by ladies and milliners, has looked with covetous eye on its downy and
beautiful plumes; while ignorance and superstition have feared and hated
the owl in all countries and all ages. In ancient Rome it was a bird of
evil omen.

Foedaque fit volucris venturi nuncia luctus,
Ignavus bubo, dirum mortalibus omen.

In India, to-day, if an owl sits on the house-top, the occupants dare
scarcely lie down to sleep, for they know that the devil is walking the
rooms and marking someone for death. Lady Macbeth, when about the murder
of Duncan, starts and whispers,

Hark! Peace! It was the owl that shrieked,
The fatal bellman.

And even as late as the nineteenth century, Waterton's aged housekeeper
"knew full well what sorrow it had brought into other houses when she
was a young woman," Witches, like modern ladies of fashion, set great
value on its wings. The latter stick them on their hats, the witches in
Macbeth threw them into their boiling cauldron. Horace's Canidia could
not complete her recipe without

"Plumamque nocturnae strigis."

We may suppose that in Britain these superstitions are gone for ever,
killed and buried by board schools and compulsory education. If they are
(there is room for an _if_) they have been succeeded by a worse, the
superstition of gamekeepers and farmers. It is worse in effect, because
these men have guns, which their predecessors had not. And it is more
wicked, because it is founded on an ignorance for which there is no
excuse. How little harm the barn owl is likely to do game may be
inferred from the fact that, when it makes its lodging in a dovecot, the
pigeons suffer no concern! Waterton (and no better authority could be
quoted) scouts the idea, common among farmers, that its business there
is to eat the pigeons' eggs. "They lay the saddle," he says, "on the
wrong horse. They ought to put it on the rat." His predecessor in the
estate had allowed the owls to be destroyed and the rats to multiply,
and there were few young pigeons in the dovecot. Waterton took str