So the guns of humanity were loaded for the owls. The birds were too strange, too interesting, too wonderful to live. The court house was no sanctuary. Late one August night one fell at a gun shot on the grass at the poplar trees. Then another on the pavement by the fountain. Another, driven from its fellows, pursued in mid air by two crows, perished of a shot wound by the steps of a farmhouse, whose acres it could have rid of field mice.

The word went out in Doylestown that the owls were a nuisance. But we visited them and studied their ways, cries, and food, to find that they were not a nuisance in their town sanctuary.

In twenty of the undigested pellets, characteristic of owls, left by them around the young birds, we found only the remains, as identified by Mr. S. N. Rhoads of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, of the bones, skulls, and hair of the field mouse (Microtus pennsylvanicus) and star nose mole (Condylura cristata). "They killed the pigeons," said someone, speaking without authority, after the manner of a gossip who takes away the character of a neighbor without proof. But they had not killed the pigeons. About twelve pairs of the latter, dwelling continually with their squabs in the garret, though they had not moved out of the particular alcove appropriated by the owls, had not been disturbed. What better proof could be asked that THE BARN OWL IS NOT A POULTRY DESTROYER?

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.