2i8 THE BOOK OF BIRDS 



is so disliked by other birds. But disliked he certainly is. 

 Many a time has he been noticed, during the daylight 

 hours, being chased from one resting-place to another by a 

 miscellaneous crowd of small birds, many of whom he could 

 slay outright with one stroke of his sharp beak. 



Sometimes he seems too dazed and stupid even to fly 

 away, but sits still with the whole noisy crew chattering 

 around him. He is of the dark, they are of the day. Ac- 

 cordingly, when something disturbs him from his slumbers 

 in barn or belfry or " old oak tree," and, scarcely knowing 

 whither he is going, he flaps out into the blinding glare, it 

 is the signal for all ordinary birds to mob him. 



The treatment meted out to him is very much like that 

 which English rustics, a century and a half ago, often 

 thought it fit and proper to offer to any poor wandering 

 foreigner who passed through their village. The fact that 

 he was peculiar in dress and language, and that his ways 

 were not their ways, was felt to be quite sufiicient excuse 

 for following him with jeers and threats, and sometimes 

 with a shower of stones. 



But the sun sets, and then — the Owl is himself again, 

 and it is the turn of the lesser birds to fear. For many 

 are the perils of the night, and it is not only of four-footed 

 prowlers that the "small fowl," as the old poet Chaucer 

 called them, must needs beware. The sharp claws of the 

 persecuted Owl will strike through feathers as well as fur ! 



Barry Cornwall, a poet more popular thirty years ago 

 than to-day, has some lively verses about the Owl, in which 

 he notes this very fact : — 



"In the hollow tree, in the grey old tower, 

 The spectral Owl doth dwell; 

 Dull, hated, despised in the sunshine hour, 

 But at dusk he's abroad and well: 



