THE POLE-TRAP 27 



murderer for it may be mentioned here. A 

 swallow fashioned her clay and " straw-built "nest, 

 laid her eggs, and hatched her young, on the 

 skeleton, and between the wings, of a luckless barn 

 owl, which had been nailed to a rafter, as if in 

 cruel mockery, in its own barn. 



Country landowners and their tenants, in old 

 times, were, it would seem, more alive than their 

 successors of the present day, alike to their own 

 interests and the beauties of Nature, when, in 

 building those picturesque old thatched barns which 

 are still one of the glories of the more rural parts of 

 England, they made a practice of leaving above the 

 door, and below the thatch, an "owl- window" or 

 hole to allow free ingress and egress to the winged 

 friend of the farmer. Such a barn, with its "owl- 

 window," is still to be seen at Dewlish, two miles 

 from Bingham's Melcombe. 



Curiously enough, the owl is as unpopular 

 amongst birds, as he is the victim of prejudice, 

 ignorance, superstition, cruelty amongst men. He 

 seems to be under a ban. "There is some sad 

 secret," well says Mr Evans in his volume on The 

 Songs of Birds, "which we do not know, which no 

 bird has yet divulged to us, and which seems to 

 have made him an outcast from the society of 



