It was objected that the owls' cries kept citizens awake at night. But when, one night last week, we heard one of their low, rattling cries, scarcely louder than the note of a katydid, and learned that the janitor had never heard the birds hoot, and that the purring and hissing of the feeding birds in the garret begins about sundown and ceases in the course of an hour, we could not believe that the sleep of any citizen ever is or has been so disturbed.
When I saw the three little white creatures yesterday in the court-house garret, making their strange bows as the candle light dazzled them, hissing with a noise as of escaping steam, as their brown eyes glowed, seemingly through dark-rimmed, heart-shaped masks, and as they bravely darted towards me when I came too near, I learned that one of the young had disappeared and that but one of the parent birds is left, the mother, who will not desert her offspring.
On October 28 two young birds were taken from their relatives to live henceforth in captivity, and it may be that two members of the same persecuted band turned from the town and flew away to build the much-talked-of nest in a hollow apple tree at Mechanics' Valley. If so, there again the untaught boy, agent of the mother that never thought, the Sunday school that never taught, and the minister of the Gospel that never spoke, was the relentless enemy of the rare, beautiful, and harmless birds. If he failed to shoot the parents, he climbed the tree and caught the young.
If the hostility to the owls of the court house were to stop, if the caged birds were to be put back with their relatives, if the nocturnal gunners were to relent, would the remaining birds continue to add an interest to the public buildings by remaining there for the future as the guests of the town? Would the citizens of Doylestown, by degrees, become interested in the pathetic fact of the birds' presence, and grow proud of their remarkable choice of sanctuary, as Dutch towns are proud of their storks? To us, the answer to these questions, with its hope of enlightenment, seems to lie in the hands of the mothers, of the teachers of Sunday schools, and of the ministers.
[Illustration: FROM COL. CHI. ACAD. SCIENCES. 5-99 GRINNELL'S WATER THRUSH. Life-size. COPYRIGHT 1899, NATURE STUDY PUB. CO., CHICAGO.]