“But let me come to the allegations that have brought me here, into the dock. Indeed, I have touched on them already; for is not the specific charge against us that we choose the night to come out of our holes and find our food? Why, what else could we do, when by daylight, by dint of seeing too much, we cease to see anything at all? Nature has given us the night, as she has given other birds the day, unwilling, in her kindly wisdom, to see the dark less useful than the light; she has appointed us her guardians to watch over the storehouses and orchards and granaries, which, above all in the night-time, become the prey of a host of pillagers. “They talk of robbery; why, what robbery can they reproach us with? Is it a malefactor’s work to purge the earth of the creatures that pick and steal, and, like unnatural cannibals, would bring their mother to her death, if we and some others, our colleagues in the same beneficent task, did not put a check on their never-ending mischiefs? Just think if we folded our arms and left them a free field; they would end by devouring the trees, along with the bit of ground where they grow, and the very folks who can never satiate their spite against us, finding themselves deprived of shady leaves and luscious fruits alike, would very soon come begging and beseeching us to return to our never-ending task. “Yet the owls, as your Honour knows, win neither respect nor profit from their irksome labours. They are not proud; you will never hear them bragging of the services they render; but modest, as becomes good workers to be, they roost quietly at home all the time they do not devote to the chase. Scorned by their brethren the birds, and persecuted by mankind, they are victims of consistent ingratitude from the very creatures they benefit; if I say this, it is to have the fact known once for all, not to protest against a state of things established for all time. We are therefore compelled to find in ourselves a happiness which society refuses us, and, living in solitude, we rear our little ones for a lot like our own. There is the head and front of our offending.