THE OWLS' SANCTUARY. 
PROF. HENRY C. MERCER. 
SEVEN bluish-white, almost spher- 
ical eggs, resting on the plaster 
floor of the court-house garret, 
at Doylestown, Pennsylvania, 
caught the eye of the janitor, Mr. 
Bigell, as one 'day last August he had 
entered the dark region by way of a 
wooden wicket from the tower. Be- 
cause the court-house pigeons, whose 
nestlings he then hunted, had made 
the garret a breeding-place for years, 
he fancied he had found another nest 
of his domestic birds. But the eggs 
were too large, and their excessive 
number puzzled him, until some weeks 
later, visiting the place again (probably 
on the morning of September 20), he 
found that all the eggs save one had 
hatched into owlets, not pigeons. 
The curious hissing creatures, two of 
which seemed to have had a week's start 
in growth, while one almost feather- 
less appeared freshly hatched, sat hud- 
dled together where the eggs had lain, 
close against the north wall and by the 
side of one of the cornice loop-holes 
left by the architect for ventilating the 
garret. Round about the young birds 
were scattered a dozen or more car- 
casses of mice (possibly a mole or 
two), some of them freshly killed, and it 
was this fact that first suggested to Mr. 
Bigell the thought of the destruction 
of his pigeons by the parent owls, who 
had thus established themselves in the 
midst of the latter's colony. But no 
squab was ever missed from the neigh- 
boring nests, and no sign of the death 
of any of the other feathered tenants 
of the garret at any time rewarded a 
search. 
As the janitor stood looking at the 
nestlings for the first time, a very large 
parent bird came in the loophole, flut- 
tered near him and went out, to return 
and again fly away, leaving him to 
wonder at the staring, brown-eyed, 
monkey-faced creatures before him. 
Mr. Bigell had thus found the rare nest 
of the barn owl, Strix pralincola, a hab- 
itation which Alexander Wilson, the 
celebrated ornithologist, had never dis- 
covered, and which had eluded the 
search of the author of " Birds of 
Pennsylvania." One of the most in- 
teresting of American owls, and of all, 
perhaps, the farmer's best friend, had 
established its home and ventured to 
rear its young, this time not in some 
deserted barn of Nockamixon swamp, 
or ancient hollow tree of Haycock 
mountain, but in the garret of the most 
public building of Doylestown, in the 
midst of the county's capital itself. 
When the janitor had left the place and 
told the news to his friends, the dark 
garret soon became a resort for the 
curious, and two interesting facts in 
connection with the coming of the 
barn owls were manifest; first, that the 
birds, which by nature nest in March, 
were here nesting entirely out of sea- 
son — strange to say, about five months 
behind time; from which it might be 
inferred that the owls' previous nests 
of the year had been destroyed, and 
their love-making broken up in the 
usual way; the way, for instance, illus- 
trated by the act of any one of a dozen 
well remembered boys who, like the 
writer, had "collected eggs;" by the 
habitude of any one of a list of pres- 
ent friends whose interest in animals 
has not gone beyond the desire to pos- 
sess them in perpetual captivity and 
watch their sad existence through the 
bars of a cage; or by the "science" of 
any one of several scientific colleagues 
who, hunting specimens for the sake of 
a show-case, "take" the female to in- 
vestigate its stomach. 
Beyond the extraordinary nesting 
date, it had been originally noticed 
that the mother of the owlets was not 
alone, four or five other barn owls hav- 
ing first come to the court-house with 
her. Driven by no one knew what fate, 
the strange band had appeared to ap- 
peal, as if in a body, to the 
protection of man. They had placed 
themselves at his mercy as a bobolink 
when storm driven far from shore 
lights upon a ship's mast. 
But it seemed, in the case of the owls, 
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