26 OWLS 



nursery in which young infants were asleep, they 

 sucked their life-blood, as they lay in their cradles. 

 Little wonder that, with such sins laid to its charge, 

 an unlucky owl which blundered into a Roman 

 house was nailed, alive and struggling, to the 

 house door, to avert the evil that it would have 

 wrought. 



We may dismiss with a sigh or smile the record 

 of such acts of stupid cruelty, hoping, perhaps, that 

 like other things which are said to have happened so 

 long ago, they may not, after all, be true. But is 

 the conduct of the game-preserver of the present day 

 one whit less stupid or less cruel, when, in spite of 

 our better knowledge, he allows his gamekeeper to 

 set a trap upon a pole for anything and everything 

 that he is pleased to call "winged vermin," leaving 

 often the unfortunate owl whose characteristic it is, 

 while in pursuit of his prey, to perch upon any 

 solitary post of vantage that presents itself to 

 perish there by inches, with head downwards, in 

 unutterable agonies, and then pays him so much 

 per head for the ghastly trophies of his murderous 

 skill, nailed, if not, as the Romans did, to the door 

 of his house, at least to an adjoining gibbet ? The 

 curious use made, on one occasion, of one of these 

 barbarous trophies but little thanks to the 



