{45} Among his various pets the writer has tried to keep owls, but not with success. On one occasion he brought home two young birds, taken from a nest on the moor. They were put into an empty pigeon-cote. The next morning they were found dead, with their claws, in fatal embrace, buried deep in each other’s eyes. At another time he reared a couple, and got them fairly tame. They were allowed to go out at night to forage for themselves. But on one occasion, for the delectation of some visitors, he turned them out in the afternoon before dusk, and (presumably), taking offence at the affront put upon them, they never returned to their quarters. For a time he heard them in the dusk, and when he called they would even hover about him, uttering a low kind of purr but keeping carefully out of his reach. {46a} The writer on Jan. 7, 1899, walking along a footpath, saw a pedlar who was meeting him, suddenly stop, and poke out a sort of bundle from the hedge-bottom with is stick. On coming up to him he asked what he had got. The reply was “One of the varmints that kill the ducks”; _i.e._, hedgehog. On his saying that he did not believe that the creature did anything of the kind, the pedlar replied, rather indignantly, that he knew an instance where a hedgehog had killed 20 ducks in a night. While, however, claiming for the hedgehog, mainly an insect, or vegetable diet, we are aware that it is open to the soft impeachment, that it does not object, like some of its betters, to an occasional “poached egg,” whether of duck, chicken, or partridge; and cases are on record of its being caught in flagrante delicto, as mentioned by Mr. E. L. Arnold, in his _Bird Life in England_. {46b} The term “sewer” does not at all imply that this stream was ever used for sewerage purposes. It is a survival from old times, once meaning a drain or water course. Commissioners of sewers were appointed by Henry VIII. under the “Statute of Sewers.” But the same bucolic mind which can see in the most graceful church tower in the kingdom “Boston _Stump_,” gives the name of “Sewer” to a stream pellucid enough to be a fount of Castaly.