SEVEN bluish-white, almost spherical 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. Because 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 featherless appeared freshly hatched, sat huddled 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 carcasses 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 neighboring 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 loop-hole, fluttered 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 pratincola, a habitation which Alexander Wilson, the celebrated ornithologist, had never discovered, and which had eluded the search of the author of "Birds of Pennsylvania."

One of the most interesting 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 season — 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, illustrated 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 present friends whose interest in animals has not gone beyond the desire to possess 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 investigate 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 having first come to the court-house with her. Driven by no one knew what fate, the strange band had appeared to appeal, 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, no heart was touched. The human reception was that which I have known the snowy heron to receive, when, wandering from its southern home, it alights for awhile to cast its fair shadow upon the mirror of the Neshaminy, or such as that which, not many years ago, met the unfortunate deer which had escaped from a northern park to seek refuge in Bucks County woods. At first it trusted humanity; at last it fled in terror from the hue and cry of men in buggies and on horseback, of enemies with dogs and guns, who pursued it till strength failed and its blood dyed the grass.