The Owl 
Traces are said still to linger in Glou- 
cestershire of a legend that had become 
long ago attached to the owl, and which 
was known to the great dramatist. He 
makes use of it in the scene where 
Ophelia appears distraught from her 
father’s death. In her incoherent talk she 
exclaims “they say the owl was a baker’s 
ba 
daughter. The tradition ran that our 
Lord one day entered a baker’s shop and 
asked for bread, which was grudgingly 
and sparingly given by the _ baker’s 
daughter who was thereupon turned by 
Christ into an owl. There has long been 
a popular feeling that something specially 
uncanny and mysterious hangs about this 
bird. 
In the Poems night is pictured in these 
words : 
Look, the world’s comrorter, with weary gait, 
His day’s hot task hath ended in the west ; 
The owl, night’s herald, shrieks, ’tis very late ; 
The sheep are gone to fold, birds to their nest.? 
1 Hamlet, iv. v. 40. 2 Venus and Adonis, 529. 
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