Brown Owls make very amusing pets and they are not hard to tame. They are less suspicious than other owls and become very companionable. R. Bosworth Smith, whose recent death was so much lamented by all bird-lovers, and who said: “Birds have been to me the solace, the recreation and the passion of a life-time,” told of one young brown owl which he brought up from the nest, which was very fond of music. It would make its way, through an open window on the ground floor, into the room in which a piano was being played and would even press closely against the case of the instrument. Dr. J. Cooper, Professor of Greek Language and Literature at Rutger’s College, New Brunswick, also told the same author that one morning in November of 1899 he found, on going to his lecture room, that a brown owl had somehow made its way into it, and had selected as a perch a huge framed photograph of Athens. It was, he remarks, an unlooked for illustration to both teacher and taught, of the proverbial expression “Owls to Athens.” And there she was, just over the Areopagus, the High Court of Athens, and she sat perched there four whole hours, that “bird of wisdom,” whilst the Professor gave as many lectures to successive classes of his pupils, quite undisturbed by the noise they made, coming and going. Before she disappeared, one of the lecturer’s brother-Professors had time to take a photograph of “the Bird of Pallas on her chosen throne.” Description: In the adult male the upper parts are of variable shades of ash-grey, mottled with brown; there are large white spots on the outer webs of the wing-coverts; the tail is barred with brown and tipped with white; the under-parts are a buffish-white, mottled with pale and streaked with dark brown. The disk about the face is greyish, having a dark brown border; the legs are feathered to the claws. The length of the bird is about 16 inches. The female is larger than the male and its plumage is a more rufous brown; but there are two varieties in this species, a red and a grey, the colour being independent of sex; the rufous form is more common in Great Britain. After the first greyish down of the nestlings they put on a more reddish brown than the adult birds have. [Illustration: USEFUL. THE LONG-EARED OWL.] THE LONG-EARED OWL. (_Asio ótus._)