the feeling that the naturalist must or should always experience in all places where nature is, even as Coventry Patmore experienced it in the presence of women. He had paid more than ordinary attention to their ways, and knew that there was yet much to learn. [Sidenote: An owl at Alton] How irrecoverable the first feeling is--a feeling which may be almost like the sense of an unseen presence, as I have described it in an account of my first visit to Selborne in the concluding chapter in a book on _Birds and Man_--was impressed upon me on the occasion of a second visit two or three years later. There was then no return of the feeling--no faintest trace of it. The village was like any other, only more interesting because of several amusing incidents in bird-life which I by chance {164} witnessed when there. Animals in a state of nature do not often move us to mirth, but on this occasion I was made to laugh several times. At first it was at an owl at Alton. I arrived there in the evening of a wet, rough day in May 1898, too late to walk the five miles that remained to my destination. After securing a room at the hotel, I hurried out to look at the fine old church, which Gilbert White admired in his day; but it was growing dark, so that there was nothing for me but to stand in the wind and rain in the wet churchyard, and get a general idea of the outline of the building, with its handsome, shingled spire standing tall against the wild, gloomy sky. By-and-by a vague figure appeared out of the clouds, travelling against the wind towards the spire, and looking more like a ragged piece of newspaper whirled about the heavens than any living thing. It was a white owl, and after watching him for some time I came to the conclusion that he was trying to get to the vane on the spire. A very idle ambition it seemed, for although he succeeded again and again in getting to within a few yards of the point aimed at, he was on each occasion struck by a fresh violent gust and driven back to a great distance, often quite out of sight in the gloom. But presently he would reappear, still striving to reach the vane. A crazy bird! but I could not help admiring his pluck, and greatly wondered what his secret motive in aiming at that windy perch could be. And at last, after so many defeats, he succeeded in grasping the metal cross-bar with his {165} crooked talons. The wind, with all its fury, could not tear him from it, and after a little flapping he was able to pull himself up; then, bending down, he deliberately wiped his beak on the bar and flew away! This, then, had been his powerful, mysterious motive--just to wipe his beak, which he could very well have wiped on any branch or barn-roof or fence, and saved himself that tremendous labour!