It was on a winter's day, in a walk on the crusted snow, during my early boyhood. Returning by the brink of a stream, I noticed a little gray mass of fur on the snow, which on examination disclosed numerous bones of what I took to be field-mice and parts of the anatomy of a mole intermingled with the hair. No vestige of flesh appeared in the mass, and I fell to wondering what manner of disease is this with which the mouse world is afflicted that should consume the flesh and leave nothing but a disjointed skeleton and a tiny pile of fur. Ah, had I only known then what I discovered a year or two later--the secret of that big hollow in the willow-tree above--my little pile of fur and bones would easily have been explained, for there summer after summer sat the little brown screech-owl, blinking in the sun at her doorway, peeping through the tiny cracks of her closed eyelids at noon, and at midnight commanding a view of the entire surrounding sedgy swamp in her eager quest for the first unfortunate shrew or deer-mouse that should peep its nose out of its nest or venture across the ice in the field of her staring vision. The new-fallen snow would doubtless show as many telltales of midnight tragedies among the little bead-eyed folk--the tiny trail terminating in a drop of blood, and a suggestive ruffling of the surrounding snow, with its plain witness of the fatal swoop of "owl on muffled wing" from its vantage-ground here in the willow-tree. To-night our little deer-mouse ventured too far from its nest among the tussocks. To-morrow night all that will be left of its sprightly squeaking identity will be a tiny pile of fur and bones disgorged in the form of pellets from the open beak of the owl on the willow-tree. In regard to these specimen pellets which my correspondent has sent to me for identification, I am not prepared to affirm that they are from the digestive laboratory of the owl. Something in their size suggests that a hawk is equally likely to be responsible for them, all the birds of prey having this same singular habit of ejecting the indigestible portions of animals which they devour. A pet red-tailed hawk which I kept during the past summer littered its pen with pellets of a similar size and consistency to these, varied on one occasion with a number composed entirely of grass, which explained a singular puzzle of the day previous, when I descried my hawk with its craw largely distended, and wondered what squirrel or chipmonk or snake had been thus caught napping in my absence. Nettle-leaf Tent-builders