August 



was seen to flit from the tower on noiseless wings, 

 gliding with the flickering motion of a bat, the 

 incongruity of motion without sound would invest 

 it with a further ghostly attribute. Seen against 

 the sky, the bird was black and square-winged ; 

 but when it returned from its excursions into the 

 meadows, its usual perch was the cross at the top of 

 a pinnacle near the belfry, and seen here in the 

 moonlight, the big white bird could not fail to strike 

 the mind by its singularity, not to mention the 

 uncouth shrieks which it exchanged with the 

 young in the tower. A white bird of nocturnal 

 habits, a noiseless flier even in the stillness of 

 night, a denizen of the lonely church tower and 

 the shunned churchyard, and an utterer of sounds 

 more human than bird-like when neither man 

 nor bird was abroad it is no wonder that 

 superstition clothed the screech-owl with unearthly 

 attributes. 



Superstition is the antithesis of humour. Both, 

 however, depend for their point upon likenesses in 

 things unlike. Superstition, hearing the almost 

 human snore of the screech-owl, labours among 

 images of ghostly torture and uneasy sleepers in the 

 grave ; humour recognizes in it the smothered trumpet- 

 ing of the late diner, or of those whose nasal organs 

 are ill adapted to the free passage of air. We all 

 know the progression of the human snore ; how it 

 mounts with increasing labour to the culminating 

 point, and, arrived there, stops abruptly, leaving night 



275 



