This name of the Silver-Spinner, however, though often in Germany, Scandinavia, and our own country associated with the poetic legend alluded to, is really a romantic derivative from the ancient connection of the small owl with the Maiden Maid goddess who presided over spinning as one of her foremost womanly attributes. ‘The Woman’s Bird,’ as the small owl is sometimes called, deserves the name, for in almost every language ancient and modern, except English and Finnish, its name is feminine. The sacred bird of Athens or the Lesbian Nyctimenê is still ‘the woman’s bird’ among the Australian aborigines: Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Icelandic, Vendish, German, French, Hungarian, all afford the same sex-indication. The great white owl, however, is the bird of heroes, wanderers, the night-foray, war, lightning, desolation, solitude, and death. It is said, I know not how demonstrated or traced, that the name Ulysses is but the variant of the Etruscan _Ulixé_ or Sikulian _Oulixes_, words supposed to indicate the ululation of the owl’s cry (in Italy I have heard the name of the sweet and plaintive little _aziola_ or _aziolo_ derived from the same source): and that it was given to the Homeric hero because he was the first to adventure sea-voyaging on moonlit nights, because he too was a night-wanderer. But unless Ulixé or Oulixes be older than the Greek name, what of Odysseus? In like fashion some speculative philologists derive ‘Pallas’ from the Turanian owl-name _Pöllö_. I heard a singular fragment of owl-folklore once on the island of Arran. The narrator said the white owl had seven distinct hoots, but all I need recall here is that the seventh was when the ‘Reul Fheasgair’ ceased to be the Evening Star and became the ‘Reul na Maidne,’ the Day-Star. Was this a memory of some myth associating the owl with the otherworld (or darkness or moontide or Night) disclosed every eve at the opening of the Gates of Dusk?... the time of sleep and dreams, of strange nocturnal life, of silence and mystery, between the soft white fire of the Vesper Star, the star of Labour as the Bretons call it, meaning that with its advent the long day’s labour ceases, and its cold serenity when it has climbed the ramparts of the midsummer night, and, as Phosphoros, the Day-Star, Son of the Morning, flashes like a lance-point against the milky onflood of the dawn? THE GARDENS OF THE SEA (A MIDSUMMER NOON’S DREAM)