For many seasons a very handsome one strutted in front of our sitting-room window. Some of the family slipped over its neck a cord on which hung a silver dime, which shone on its blue feathers. Alas for his majesty! Strutting in the road one day, a horse shied at him, and its owner threw a stone and killed the beauty. The peahen, a meek-looking matron with a green neck and long gray feathers, is very secretive as to a nest, and seeks an orchard or wheatfield. When the little gray brood, from three to five in number, are a few weeks old she brings them to the yard. Peafowls scorn the shelter of a house and roost in the loftiest trees. Near our home are some tall oaks and under them they gather on summer evenings, and, after many shrill good-night cries, fly upward to the high limbs. In cold weather they do not come down until late in the day. Sometimes on snowy days they get so weighted with snow that they cannot fly up, and so settle on the ground, and their long feathers freezing, have to be cut loose. In June or early July their feathers begin to drop, and to secure them they must be plucked. Though so docile as to frequent the porches, they do not like to be caught, but take to the wing, so a rainy day is selected, when their feathers are weighted with water, and they are soon chased down. After being plucked they are unsteady in gait and hide in the bushes for days. Peafowls have a strong home-feeling and when taken away are hard to retain; as they wander off, striving to return. They are enemies to young chickens, and are exasperating to the good housewife, as they are hard to drive away, performing a circle and returning. The peafowl is almost as good a table fowl as the turkey. OWLS. JOHN WINTHROP SCOTT. Birds that fly in the night and whose wings move so smoothly through the air that they make no noise act much like the burglar that gets into your house quietly when you are asleep to steal your money. But the owl is not a burglar. He is the friend of man. There is no other bird that does the farmer so much good as the owl. The owl comes out in the dark to get the small animals that are out at that time stealing things from the farmer. So we may call the owl the night watchman of the farm. He sometimes comes out in the daytime, but most owls prefer the night or at least a dark day. The owl has been called a wise bird for the same reason that some men are thought to be wise--he looks wise. One reason he looks so steadily at you that you think he is studying you is because the light is so strong in the daytime that his sight is bad. But the owl is not as wise as he is said to be. He does some foolish things as well as other birds. In fact he is sometimes more foolish than any other bird would be in the same place. One owl was known to sit for more than a half day under a leaking water tap. The water fell at the rate of twenty drops a minute right down upon the owl's head, and yet he was not wise enough to move out of the wet.