till we had laid down the corpse. He swore that he saw the
sack in the moonlight. This was a horse-cloth with which we had intended
to saddle the "cowt," and that had remained, during the supernatural
agency under which we laboured, clutched unconsciously and convulsively
in our grasp. Long was it ere Davie Donald would see us in our true
light--but at length he drew on his Kilmarnock nightcap, and coming out
with a bouet, let us through the trance and out of the front door,
thoroughly convinced, till we read Bewick, that old Southfield was not
dead, although in a very bad way indeed. Let this be a lesson to
schoolboys not to neglect the science of natural history, and to study
the character of the White Owl.

OWLS--both White and common Brown, are not only useful in a mountainous
country, but highly ornamental. How serenely beautiful their noiseless
flight; a flake of snow is not winnowed through the air more
softly-silent! Gliding along the dark shadows of a wood, how spiritual
the motion--how like the thought of a dream! And then, during the hushed
midnight hours, how jocund the whoop and hollo from the heart of a
sycamore--grey rock, or ivied Tower! How the Owls of Windermere must
laugh at the silly Lakers, that under the garish eye of day, enveloped
in clouds of dust, whirl along in rattling post-shays in pursuit of the
picturesque! Why, the least imaginative Owl that ever hunted mice by
moonlight on the banks of Windermere, must know the character of its
scenery better than any poetaster that ever dined on char at Bowness or
Lowood. The long quivering lines of light illumining some sylvan
isle--the evening-star shining from the water to its counterpart in the
sky--the glorious phenomenon of the double moon--the night-colours of
the woods--and, once in the three years perhaps, that loveliest and most
lustrous of celestial forms, the lunar rainbow--all these and many more
beauteous and magnificent sights are familiar to the Owls of Windermere.
And who know half so well as they do the echoes of Furness, and
Applethwaite, and Loughrigg, and Landale, all the way on to Dungeon-Gill
and Pavey-Ark, Scawfell and the Great Gable, and that sea of mountains,
of which every wave has a name? Midnight--when asleep so still and
silent--seems inspired with the joyous spirit of the Owls in their
revelry--and answers to their mirth and merriment through all her
clouds. The Moping Owl, indeed!--the Boding Owl, forsooth!--the
Melancho