“_’S co-aoise mise do’n daraig, Bha na fhaillain ann sa choinnich, ’S ioma linn a chuir mi romham, ’S gur mi comhachag bhochd na sroine._” (I am old as the oak ... lit. ‘the ancientness upon me is that of the oak’ ... whose mossy roots spread wide: many a race have I seen come and go: and still I am the lonely owl of Srona.) In every country the owl is a bird of mourning. It is also the bird of night pre-eminently (what a pity the old-English owl-light as a variant for twilight has become obsolete); the bird of moonlight or the Moon; the bird of Silence, of Ruin, of the Grave, of Death. In some places a dead owl is still transfixed to the outside of a door, to avert lightning. Perhaps it is for the same reason that a caged owl is held to be a dangerous co-inmate of a house during a thunderstorm. A thousand legends have woven this sombre raiment of associations, though the owl’s only distinction from other birds of prey is that it can see in the dark and is nocturnal in habit. It loves solitary places, because there undisturbed, but is not all darkness solitary? In Syria the peasant calls the owl ‘the mother of ruins,’ which is poetically apt, as is the German ‘the sorrowing mother,’ but our northern ‘night-witch’ and the grim Breton ‘soul-harrier’ (surely a survival of the Greek idea of the owl as a soul-guide) are unjust to an inoffensive bird whose concern is not with souls and graves and ruins but with rats and mice. A German naturalist has even, I remember, written to prove that the owl is pre-eminently a bird of love, of single-hearted devotion, ‘the dove of the night’: and there is a Danish poem about ‘the Silver-Spinner’ weaving a thin invisible web in the dusk wherein to entangle and bring close the hearts of lovers. Old Donald Finlay of the Songs must have had some such idea in his mind when in his Song of the Owl he makes the bird say in effect, ‘I may be old and forlorn, but am not to be blamed for that: neither of rapine nor of lies have I ever been guilty: is there a grave anywhere that I have ever violated? and to the mate of my choice have I ever been faithless?’