The OWL plays a large part in Shakespeare’s references to bird-life. He does not discriminate between the different members of the large family probably included under this name, though he distinguishes some of their respective cries. He heightens the feeling of the eeriness of night by introducing the remarkable sound of the owl’s voice, and most effectively when some deed of villainy is on foot, or as one of the signs popularly supposed to portend coming disaster. He includes the owl also in that fairy world which he has made so real. It will be enough to cite a few examples of these different usages in his works. Traces are said still to linger in Gloucestershire of a legend that had become long ago attached to the owl, and which was known to the great dramatist. He makes use of it in the scene where Ophelia appears distraught from her father’s death. In her incoherent talk she exclaims “they say the owl was a baker’s daughter.”[99] The tradition ran that our Lord one day entered a baker’s shop and asked for bread, which was grudgingly and sparingly given by the baker’s daughter who was thereupon turned by Christ into an owl. There has long been a popular feeling that something specially uncanny and mysterious hangs about this bird. In the Poems night is pictured in these words: Look, the world’s comforter, with weary gait, His day’s hot task hath ended in the west; The owl, night’s herald, shrieks, ’tis very late; The sheep are gone to fold, birds to their nest.[100] The time chosen by Bolingbroke for the incantation scene in Gloucester’s garden was Deep night, dark night, the silent of the night, The time when screech-owls cry, and ban-dogs howl, And spirits walk, and ghosts break up their graves.[101] In a view of winter the owl is made to play its part: When icicles hang by the wall, And Dick the shepherd blows his nail, And Tom bears logs into the hall, And milk comes frozen home in pail, When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul, Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit; Tu-who, a merry note, While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.[102] [Illustration: THE BARN-OWL] The poet has noted “the night owl’s lazy flight,”[103] and the predatory habits of the “mousing owl.”[104] He has increased the glamour of the night-scenes in the tragedy of Macbeth by the introduction of this bird. When Lady Macbeth, alone and on the alert for the perpetration of the murder, hears a sound, she exclaims in anxious suspense: Hark!――Peace! It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman Which gives the stern’st good-night.[105] Her husband, too, after he has done the deed, emerges to her with the eager question “Didst thou not hear a noise?”; to which she replies, “I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry.” Next morning before the fatal news had become known it was reported that, through the midst of a storm,