24 OWLS 



of the North-American Indians it is said that the 

 priest or medicine-man conceals his own head and 

 shoulders within its head and skin. It is a fitting 

 garb for the seer to whose prophetic insight the 

 stirring present is not more visible than the remote 

 past and the dim and distant future. This is the 

 bird which, as the Red Indian believes, in his 

 sorrowful cry, uttered, night after night, from the 

 deep fir forest, of " Koo Koo Skoos," "Oh I am 

 sorry, Oh I am sorry," laments the Golden age, 

 when men and animals understood one another 

 better than they do now, while, as yet, they lived 

 in amity, and the Great Spirit had not been 

 driven by their differences beyond the seas, never 

 to return, till they had become friends again. * That 

 there was such a time, while mythologies were 

 still in the making, when men and animals were 

 not divided from each other by any such broad line 

 of demarcation, as in spite of the revolution and 

 revelation made by Darwin is supposed by many 

 people to divide them still, the study of Comparative 

 Religion and all other lines of investigation seem to 

 show. And if so, it has been well remarked that 



* Quoted by Rev. M. G. Walker in his " Natural History 

 of the Ancients," from Adam's Field and Forest Rambles in 

 New Brunswick, p. 55. 



