ting through a long sermon, affecting various concealments and
excuses for going to sleep in the daytime. The milky eagle-owl pretends
to be waiting for a friend who never keeps his appointment. You come
upon him as he is dozing away quietly; he sees you just between his
eyelids, and at once stares angrily down the path as if he were sick of
waiting, and the other owl already half an hour overdue. Of course there
is no owl coming, so he shakes his head testily and half shuts his eyes.
If you go away then, he goes to sleep again. If you stay, he presently
makes another pretence of pulling out his watch and wondering if that
owl is ever coming. He has practised the transparent deception so long
that he does it now mechanically, and sleeps, I believe, or nearly so,
through the whole process. The oriental owl does it rather differently.
He doesn't open his eyes when you first wake him--this in order to give
greater verisimilitude to his pretence of profound meditation; he wishes
you to understand that it is not your presence that causes him to open
his eyes, but the natural course of his philosophical speculations. As a
pundit, he disdains to appear to observe you; so he gazes solemnly at a
vast space with nothing whatever for its centre. He sees you, but he
knows you for a creature that never carries raw meat with it, like a
keeper; a creature beneath the notice of _Bubo orientalis_.

[Illustration: MILKY REPOSE.]

[Illustration: IS HE COMING?]

[Illustration: WHAT A NUISANCE!]

As a song-bird, the owl is not a conspicuous success. Perhaps he has
learned this in the Zoo, for he cannot be induced to perform during
visiting hours. He is a reserved person, and exclusive. If you, as a
stranger, attempt to scrape his acquaintance, he meets you with an
indignant stare--confound your impudence! Nothing in this world can
present such a picture of offended, astounded dignity as an owl. I often
wonder what he said when Noah ordered him peremptorily into the Ark. As
for myself, I should as soon think of ordering one of the beadles at the
Bank.

[Illustration: NOT YET?]

[Illustration: OH, HANG IT!]

Many worthy owls, long since passed away as living things, now exist in
their astral forms as pepper-boxes and tobacco-jars. They probably
belonged, in life, to the same species as a friend of mine here, who
exhibits one of their chief physical features. He sits immovably still,
so far as his body--his jar or pepper-reservoir--is