248 CHAPTERS ON THE NATURAL HISTORY 



was given over to making a collection of birds of the neighbor- 

 hood where my parents lived. Frequently I was up long before 

 daylight and out in the field or forest, and sometimes did not. 

 return home until eight or nine o'clock in the evening. Upon 

 one of these latter occasions, and when within a very short dis- 

 tance of the house, I shot at a Screech owl in a neighbor's apple 

 tree. It fell in the soft snow that had fallen during the day, and 

 as I picked its apparently lifeless body up, I saw that it was one 

 of the rufous-plumaged varieties. My specimen was at once con- 

 signed to a pocket in my gunning-coat, and I hastened home in 

 order to be present at family prayers in the evening, as my good 

 mother desired this, in order not to offend my reverend uncle, 

 who was a very distinguished man in the Episcopal faith, and a 

 guest with us at the time. His aged mother, my grandmother, 

 was also with us, and she was an extremely devout old lady 

 indeed, too, and invariably frowned upon any member of the 

 family that failed to appear promptly at evening prayers. As I 

 hastily entered the dining-room I realized at once that I had 

 earned a black mark in my grandmother's estimation, as the 

 entire family brothers, aunts, guests and all, were down kneel- 

 ing at the chairs, and uncle was apparently half way through the 

 service of the hour. Hastily slipping on my wrapper, and tossing 

 my gunning-coat upon a sofa in the corner of the room where 

 they were assembled, I, too, as quietly as possible knelt at my 

 chair, and this latter happened to be so placed that I could see 

 my coat where I had laid it. Uncle prayed long and well, and 

 had a way of pausing, for a moment or more, between his sen- 

 tences. During one of these periods of deathly silence, I noticed 

 a peculiar movement of my gunning-coat, that soon became more 

 and more vigorous, to terminate in the sudden emergence of my 

 owl, who, having at last mastered the mysteries of the abnormal 

 cavity he was in, bounced out to sit bolt upright upon the gar- 

 ment. Angrily he clicked his mandibles; wildly he stared about 

 the room; and politely he ducked his head to every one present 

 there. But clickings, bows, and stares were all lost, save upon 

 myself and two brothers, who likewise had caught sight of his 

 resurrected owlship, and were doing their best to smother their 

 laughter. Uncle's mind as well as those of the ladies were far, 

 far off in the regions of space. The owl had evidently never seen 

 anything like this before, human or otherwise, and having suf- 

 ficiently recovered his senses, and the knockdown he had gotten 



