166 THE BARN OWL. 



castle, or cathedral, is apt to create an eerie feeling, when the 

 shard-borne beetle with drowsy hum, and spectral bat on 

 leathern wing, begin to flit about, and silence with darkness 

 shrouds the earth ; " While overhead," as Wordsworth says, 



" Roared the loud blast, and from the toivcr the oivl 

 Scream' d as the tempest shook her secret nest." 



" For thou know'st in the days of innocency Adam fell, 

 So, what should poor Jack Falstaff do in the days of villainy ? " 



The barn owl has been accused of snoring — like a toper in his 

 sleep ; but this has been traced to the cry of its young for food. 

 It was once common in St Andrews, whose monastic seclusion 

 and general decay, after the Reformation, suited its own 

 secluded habits. It had its nest in the gloomy ruins of Cardinal 

 Beaton's Castle, in the remnant cloisters and walls of Hepburn's 

 Abbey, and in the holes of the once magnificent cathedral, as 

 well as in the high cliffs, called the " scaurs," between the castle 

 and the " Witch Lake." When the cathedral debris was cleared 

 out by the Exchequer in 1789, "the only thing of interest 

 they found" — says a local historian — " was a barn owl reposing 

 under one of the stone coffins at the High Altar," supposed to be 

 that of the young Archbishop Alexander Stewart, who fell with 

 his father at the fatal Battle of Flodden, when the nobility of 

 Scotland "were a' wede awa' " as the "Flowers of the Forest." 

 And when Dr Johnson visited St Andrews in 1773 its gaunt 

 ruins and grass-grown streets made him say : " When the city of 

 St Andrews lost its archi-episcopal pre-eminence it gradually 

 decayed ; one of its streets is now lost (?), and in those that 

 remain there is the silence and solitude of inactive indigence and 

 gloomy depopulation ; " and the Rev. James Hall, in his "Travels 

 in Scotland" in 1807, also says: "The general aspect of the 

 priory and other ancient monasteries, the cathedral church, the 

 castle — the residence of the archbishops, and sometimes of kings 

 — the streets grown over with grass and solid turf, and even the 

 colleges, suggests nothing but the melancholy idea of former 

 magnificence and grandeur, now in ruins " — hence the better re- 

 treat for the barn owl, which did not, however, in 1773, 

 prevent the professors from giving surly Sam and Boswell, who 

 accompanied him, "A superb treat to Dr Samuel Johnson." 

 Poor, unfortunate young "Bob Fergusson" (the forerunner of 

 Burns), who was a student in the University at the time,* records 

 it thus — 



* I saw his signature, in pencil, behind one of the shutters, before the old east wing was 

 pulled down. 



