| teries of the darkness 
= 
NIGHT WITCHERY. . 53 
foreboding, tremulous' wail; for it would seem that the bird of 
wisdom has not yet lived down the evil aspersion of its antique 
slanderers. “The scritch owl,” says Pliny, “alwaies betokeneth 
some heavie newes, and is most execrable and accursed. In 
summe he is the very monster of the night, neither crying nor 
singing out cleare, but uttering a certaine heavie groane of dole- 
ful mourning, and therefore if it be seene to fly abroad in any 
place it prognosticateth some fearful misfortune ;” a belief which 
still prevails quite commonly among credulous country-folk, to 
whom this nightly visitant in the orchard or maples is the signal 
for the direst foreboding. Poor maligned, 
feathered grimalkin! What does he say 
to me here in the moonlight gloom of the 
woods, as he sits there in the shadow 
on the pine branch, his glowing 
eyes revealing all the mys- 
in their illuminated 
searching shafts, and 
now with alert poise 
and ears uppricked, his 
eyes quenched as he turns 
his head away towards the 
opening of the wood, filling 
the leafy vault with the soft, tremulous cry? And what is this 
to the rightly informed ear but the message, not of “doleful 
mourning” and “heavie newes,” but the same that is borne in the 
song of the thrush, the tidings rather of life and love, a wooing 
to the listening mate, whose echo answers with near and nearer 
response across the valley mist? How infinitely more musical 
and welcome, this witching nocturne of the owl, than the dismal 
midnight duo of his quadrupedal counterpart of the backyard 
fence, that yet brings no compensating terrors of superstition ! 
As in the owl we have our nocturnal puss of featherdom, so 
also in the dusky bat have we our winged mouse. We hear 
their nightly squeaking convocation in the loosened clapboards 
