The talisman known as the raven-stone was held to confer on its holder invisibility, and we may remark in passing on the curious attraction that in the Middle Ages this gift of invisibility possessed, whether used as a means of shielding one’s self from dangers, as a means of inflicting without detection injuries on others, or the dishonourable desire of secretly spying upon their proceedings. It appears to point to a somewhat unwholesome state of things, too suggestive of cowardice and treachery to be at all an object to be sought after. There were many such kinds of talisman, all doubtless of equal efficacy, and all of them, naturally, presenting considerable difficulties in acquisition. The raven-stone was no exception. It was necessary first to discover a nest, then to climb the tree and to take from the brood one of the nestlings and kill it. The victim must be a male bird and not more than six weeks old. So far, with reasonable powers of observation, a fair amount of agility, and sufficient sense to visit the nest at a time when one might reasonably expect to find young birds therein, there would appear to be no great difficulty; but unless the parent birds were at least a hundred years old, all this preliminary trouble was of no avail. Having descended the tree in safety, the slaughtered nestling had to be placed at its foot, and watch kept for the return of the parent raven. On its return it will be observed to place a stone in the throat of its offspring, whereupon nothing remains but to secure the treasure and proceed to exercise its mystic power. How many persons actually put the matter to the test it is of course impossible to say, but full belief in its efficacy was for generations an article of faith to thousands. The owl, like the raven, was regarded by our forefathers with great awe as an omen of misfortune and death; thus in Shakespeare we find several allusions to this superstitious belief— “Out on ye owls! nothing but songs of death,” and the “boding scritch owl,” as he is called in Henry VI., reappears in Macbeth in the passage:— “It was the owl that shriek’d; that fatal bellman Which giv’st the stern’st good night.” The idea dates from time immemorial. Pliny says, in the tenth book of his “Natural History,” that “the scritch-owle betokeneth alwaies some heavie newes, and is most execrable and accursed. He keepeth ever in the deserts, and loveth not only such unpeopled places, but also those that are horrible hard of accesse. In summer, he is the verie monster of the night, neither crying, nor singing out cleare, but uttering a certaine heavie grone of dolefull moning. And, therefore, if he be seene within citties or otherwise abroad in any place it is not for good, but prognosticateth some fearfull misfortune.”