and it is now a treasured ornament of the front parlor.

The barn-owl is not found in our region either, which is a pity, for he is not only one of the most humorous-looking creatures in the feathered kingdom, running a close race for first honors with the penguin and the puffin, but he is also a great destroyer of rodents far exceeding the much-vaunted barn cat, which usually prefers milk to mice. I have often wondered why the bird societies do not try the experiment of distributing barnowls to regions where they are not at present found. The same barn-owl, in Europe, lives in deserted castles and haunted towers and

does to the moon complain

Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, Molest her ancient solitary reign.1

Undoubtedly he is also the owl who, on a certain famous and romantic evening, "for all his feathers was acold." It is rather curious that two birds so famous in Old World song and legend as the peregrine falcon and the barn-owl should play so slight a part in our New World life. The barn-owl, at least, deserves recognition and protection. Some years ago a colony of barn-owls lived in the Smithsonian tower in Washington, entering and leaving by a broken window. Somebody mended this window, thus killing all the owls inside and driving away all who were outside at the time. A careful and expert examination of the dead birds, the pellets, and the nests showed that the owls of this colony had been taking a tremendous toll of rodents and small pests; they had been a positive asset to the surrounding community.

Many observers maintain that the barred owl (which is somewhat smaller than the great horned, and is often called the "eight-hooter," because his call has eight notes) is now more common than his larger cousin. This is probably true in } 1Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard."

many, if not most, sections of Massachusetts, though hardly here where I live, I think, in the mountains and close to extensive tracts of woodland. The barred owl is not a robber like the great horned. He lives chiefly on mice and other small mammals, and should be protected. The following note from the illustrator is interesting and vivid.

Once I was fishing for bullheads at night on Lake Catherine near Poultney, Vermont, and I heard a barred owl and answered him. Inside of half an hour I had three in one tree on the edge of the lake; I could even hear them squabbling and flapping among the limbs of the tree. They kept answering me for an hour or more. When I began calling I could hear them approach down the mountain by stages-first far off, then nearer, then from the lake margin, and then an interval and the voice would come from the nearer shore, the owl having flown across. It was exciting.

I fancy that for most Americans the little screech-owl (so called, though he doesn't screech) really inspires the roof the barn-owl. That soft, mournful, mance which in Europe is the possession prolonged whistle of his, that quavering note as if he always had his vox humana stop pulled all the way out-whoo-oo-oo00-00--00---00---00 has been heard by all of us, winter and summer, in the still house. Many a night, as a boy, I have night, often from the orchard beside the lain in bed and listened to the owl calling from his hole in an old apple-tree, while the November wind rustled the dead leaves on the oak beside my window and a delicious melancholy stole over me. Many a time, too, I have seen, in the daytime, the face of the little fellow peering from a hole, and watched it fade mysteriously from sight as I drew near, much like the Cheshire cat when conversing with Alice. However, if you poked your hand down into the hole, it was no spirit nip you got on the finger! The screech-owl, something like the black bear, has a red phase. (The so-called cinnamon bear is not a separate species). Certain observers have sought to explain this by differin diet. Doctor Eaton discov

ences

ered that the red-owls he examined had been eating crayfish. As the screechowls in the Mississippi Valley, where crayfish are abundant, are more often red than gray, there would seem to be some basis for the theory. The little fellows nest in early spring, laying their eggs in New England before May 1st, and they often use an old flicker-hole. Undoubtedly, the owls could be persuaded into artificial boxes, and this should be done. Not only are they beneficial birds, hunting mice eagerly, but their faces at the nest hole by day are odd and pretty sights, and when they are caught outside the nest and puff themselves out or draw themselves up straight and thin, to look like a strip of bark, they are excellent examples of the protective instinct at work.

Last spring, in April, we enjoyed for several evenings a curious experience. In a meadow near our farm, and beside the road under the mountain wall, suddenly appeared a flock of screech-owls. There must have been twoscore at the least. Evidently they foregather, something like crows, at the news of good hunting, and make a clean-up. This meadow, which also comprised a garden and cornfield where the corn had stood shocked all winter, was no doubt full of mice. Beginning at sundown and keeping it up till about nine or nine-thirty, the owls hunted over this field for five or six nights, and then disappeared again. They flew low, back and forth, and as they flew they kept up their quavering call, which, when they are on the wing, is fairly loud and sounds a little like a kind of mournful laughter. The air was so full of this sound, which would come rustling at you overhead, and grow fainter into the distance as the dim, receding form of the bird was outlined against the late twilight sky, that it was strangely unreal, almost as if you stood with Dante on a brink where the lost souls fluttered past. Only the shrill peeping of the hylas kept the sense of our familiar fields in April.

I had never seen so many owls, of any sort, at one time before.

He

There is one bird not classed with the raptores which visits us in winter and must be included among those foes of animal or bird life which swoop down out of the air. It is the Northern shrike, or butcher-bird. He is purely a winter visitor in the East, and I think is growing much less common. The Northern shrike is a little over ten inches in length, gray on top, with black tail and wings. On each wing is a white spot, and the ends of the tail feathers are white. will pursue a winter bird like a treesparrow or chickadee or nuthatch relentlessly through trees and thickets till the poor little thing is exhausted, when the shrike kills him by a blow on top of the head and carries him off. One of his curious tricks is to impale his prey on a thorn or the barb of a fence. If you have ever found a small bird or mouse thus impaled, he was probably put there by a shrike. The captor perhaps was later scared away, or he may even have killed for the love of it, without any intention of eating his prey. One of the oddest shrike tricks I have seen recorded is that described by an observer in Birds of New York. This bird was hunting sparrows near the railroad yards in Green Island, New York. He caught two and impaled them on the point of a lightning-rod at the top of a brick chimney a hundred and forty feet high. A pair of fieldglasses were used to verify the fact.

On a little artificial pond near my farm we have seen domestic ducks pulled under and killed by snapping-turtles (the submarine menace); we have seen fish taken by an osprey (the hydroplane menace); we have seen hens and pheasants and other creatures killed by hawks and owls (the airplane and Zeppelin menace). When it come to cruelty, even in our little world of farms and peaceful hills and lovely forests nature has given man most of his lessons; which, to be sure, is hardly a valid excuse for man, at that.

back at the immense effort of the British people in the war, our high sum of sacrifice in blood and treasure, and the patient courage of our fighting-men, the world must, and does, indeed, acknowledge that the old stoic virtue of our race was called out by this supreme challenge, and stood the strain. The traditions of a thousand years of history filled with war and travail and adventure, by which old fighting races had blended with different strains of blood and temper-Roman, Celtic, Saxon, Danish, Norman-survived in the fiber of our modern youth, country-bred or city-bred, in spite of the weakening influences of slumdom, vicious environment, ill-nourishment, clerkship, and sedentary life. The Londoner was a good soldier. The Liverpools and Manchesters were hard and tough in attack and defense. The South Country battalions of Devon and Dorsets, Sussex and Somersets, were not behindhand in ways of death. The Scots had not lost their fire and passion, but were terrible in their onslaught. The Irish battalions, with recruiting cut off at the base, fought with their old gallantry, until there were few to answer the last roll-call. The Welsh dragon encircled Mametz Wood, devoured the "Cockchafers" on Pilkem Ridge, and was hard on the trail of the Black Eagle in the last offensive. The Australians and Canadians had all the British quality of courage and the benefit of a harder physique, gained by outdoor life and un

1From Now It Can Be Told by Philip Gibbs. Copyright, 1920, by Harper and Brothers. Reprinted by permission.

weakened ancestry. In the mass, apart from neurotic types here and there among officers and men, the stock was true and strong. The spirit of a seafaring race which has the salt in its blood from Land's End to John o' Groat's and back again to Wapping had not been destroyed, but answered the ruffle of Drake's drum and, with simplicity and gravity in royal navy and in merchant marine, swept the highways of the seas, hunted worse monsters than any fabulous creatures of the deep, and shirked no dread adventure in the storms and darkness of a spacious hell. The men who went to Zeebrugge were the true sons of those who fought the Spanish Armada and singed the King o' Spain's beard in Cadiz harbor. The victors of the Jutland battle were better men than Nelson's (the scourings of the prisons and the sweepings of the press-gang) and not less brave in frightful hours. Without the service of the British seamen the war would have been lost for France and Italy and Belgium, and all of us.

The flower of our youth went out to France and Flanders, to Egypt, Palestine, Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and Saloniki, and it was a fine flower of gallant boyhood, clean, for the most part eager, not brutal except by intensive training, simple in minds and hearts, chivalrous in instinct, without hatred, adventurous, laughterloving, and dutiful. That is God's truth, in spite of vice-rotted, criminal, degenerate, and brutal fellows in many battalions, as in all crowds of men.

In millions of words during the years of war I recorded the bravery of our

troops on the western front, their patience, their cheerfulness, suffering, and agony; yet with all those words describing day by day the incidents of their life in war I did not exaggerate the splendor of their stoic spirit or the measure of their sacrifice. The heroes of mythology were but paltry figures compared with those who, in the great war, went forward to the roaring devils of modern gun-fire, dwelt amid high explosives more dreadful than dragons, breathed in the fumes of poison-gas more foul than the breath of Medusa, watched and slept above mine-craters which upheaved the hellfire of Pluto, and defied thunderbolts more certain in death-dealing blows than those of Jove.

Something there was in the spirit of our men which led them to endure these things without revolt-ideals higher than the selfish motives of life. They did not fight for greed or glory, not for conquest, nor for vengeance. Hatred was not the inspiration of the mass of them, for I am certain that except in hours when men "see red" there was no direct hatred of the men in the opposite trenches, but, on the other hand, a queer sense of fellowfeeling, a humorous sympathy for "old Fritz," who was in the same bloody mess as themselves. Our generals, it is true, hated the Germans. "I should like one week in Cologne," one of them told me, before there seemed ever a chance of getting there, "and I would let my men loose in the streets and turn a blind eye to anything they liked to do."

exceptions to this treatment, but even the Australians and the Scots, who were most fierce in battle, giving no quarter sometimes, treated their prisoners with humanity when they were bundled back. Hatred was not the motive which made our men endure all things. It was rather, as I have said, a refusal in their souls to be beaten in manhood by all the devils of war, by all its terrors, or by its beastliness, and at the back of all the thought that the old country was "up against it" and that they were there to avert the evil.

Young soldiers of ours, not only of officer rank, but of "other ranks," as they were called, were inspired at the beginning, and some of them to the end, with a simple, boyish idealism. They saw no other causes of war than German brutality. The enemy to them was the monster who had to be destroyed lest the world. and its beauty should perish-and that was true so long as the individual German, who loathed the war, obeyed the discipline of the herd-leaders and did not revolt against the natural laws which, when the war had once started, bade him die in defense of his own Fatherland. Many of those boys of ours made a dedication of their lives upon the altar of sacrifice, believing that by this service and this sacrifice they would help the victory of civilization over barbarism, and of Christian morality over the devil's law. They believed that they were fighting to dethrone militarism, to insure the happiness and liberties of civilized peoples, and were sure of the gratitude of their

"If I had a thousand Germans in a row," one of them said to me, "I would cut all their throats, and enjoy the job."

But that was not the mentality of the men in the ranks, except those who were murderers by nature and pleasure. They gave their cigarettes to prisoners and filled their water-bottles and chatted in a friendly way with any German who spoke a little English, as I have seen them time and time again on days of battle, in the fields of battle. There were

fall upon the field of honor, but go home blind or helpless.

I have read many letters from boys now dead in which they express that faith.

"Do not grieve for me," wrote one of them, "for I shall be proud to die for my country's sake."

"I am happy," wrote another (I quote the tenor of his letters), "because, though

hate war, I feel that this is the war to end war. We are the last victims of this way of argument. By smashing the German war-machine we shall prove for

all time the criminal folly of militarism and Junkerdom."

There were young idealists like that, and they were to be envied for their faith, which they brought with them from public schools and from humble homes where they had read old books and heard old watchwords. I think, at the beginning of the war, there were many like that. But as it continued year after year doubts crept in, dreadful suspicions of truth more complex than the old simplicity, a sense of revolt against sacrifice unequally shared and devoted to a purpose which was not that for which they had been called to fight.

They had been told that they were fighting for liberty. But their first lesson was the utter loss of individual liberty under a discipline which made the private soldier no more than a number. They were ordered about like galleyslaves, herded about like cattle, treated individually and in the mass with utter disregard of their comfort and well-being. Often, as I know, they were detrained at rail-heads in the wind and rain and by ghastly errors of staff-work kept waiting for their food until they were weak and famished. In the base camps men of one battalion were drafted into other battalions, where they lost their old comrades and were unfamiliar with the speech and habits of a crowd belonging to different counties, the Sussex men going to a Manchester regiment, the Yorkshire men being drafted to a Surrey unit. By R. T. O.'s and A. M. L. O.'s1 and camp commandments and town majors and staff pups men were bullied and bundled about, not like human beings, but like dumb beasts, and in a thousand ways injustice, petty tyranny, hard 'work, degrading punishments for trivial offenses, struck at their souls and made the name of personal liberty a mockery. From their own individuality they argued to broader issues. Was this war for liberty? Were the masses of men on either side fighting

'Railway Transport Officer and Assistant Military Landing Officer.

with free will as free men? Those Germans were they not under discipline, each man of them, forced to fight whether they liked it or not? Compelled to go forward to sacrifice, with machine-guns behind them to shoot them down if they revolted against their slave-drivers? What liberty had they to follow their conscience or their judgment-"Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die"-like all soldiers in all armies. Was it not rather that the masses of men engaged in slaughter were serving the purpose of powers above them, rival powers, greedy for one another's markets, covetous of one another's wealth, and callous of the lives of humble men? Surely if the leaders of the warring nations were put together for even a week in some such place as Hooge, or the Hohenzollern redoubt, afflicted by the usual harassing fire, poison-gas, mine explosions, lice, rats, and the stench of rotting corpses, with the certainty of death or dismemberment at the week-end, they would settle the business and come to terms before the week was out. I heard that proposition put forward many times by young officers of ours, and as an argument against their own sacrifice they found it unanswerable.

The condition and psychology of their own country as they read about it in the Paris Daily Mail, which was first to come into their billets, filled some of these young men with distress and disgust, strengthened into rage when they went home on leave. The deliberate falsification of news (the truth of which they heard from private channels) made them discredit the whole presentation of our case and state. They said, "Propaganda!" with a sharp note of scorn. The breezy optimism of public men, preachers, and journalists, never downcast by black news, never agonized by the slaughter in these fields, minimizing horrors and loss and misery, crowing over the enemy, prophesying early victory which did not come, accepting all the destruction of manhood (while they stayed safe) as a necessary and inevitable "misfortune,"