ening twilight, a
breakfast. We therefore agree with him in thinking that there is no sort
of harm in a heavy breakfast. After having passed a pleasant night in
eating and flirting, he goes to bed betimes about four o'clock in the
morning; and, as Bewick observes, makes a blowing hissing noise,
resembling the snoring of a man. Indeed nothing can be more diverting to
a person annoyed by blue devils, than to look at a white Owl and his
wife asleep. With their heads gently inclined towards each other, there
they keep snoring away like any Christian couple. Should the one make a
pause, the other that instant awakes, and, fearing something may be
wrong with his spouse, opens a pair of glimmering winking eyes, and
inspects the adjacent physiognomy with the scrutinising stare of a
village apothecary. If all be right, the concert is resumed, the snore
sometimes degenerating into a sort of snivel, and the snivel into a
blowing hiss. First time we heard this noise was in a churchyard when we
were mere boys, having ventured in after dark to catch the minister's
colt for a gallop over to the parish capital, where there was a
dancing-school ball. There had been a nest of Owls in some hole in the
spire; but we never doubted for a moment that the noise of snoring,
blowing, hissing, and snapping proceeded from a testy old gentleman that
had been buried that forenoon, and had come alive again a day after the
fair. Had we reasoned the matter a little, we must soon have convinced
ourselves that there was no ground for alarm to us at least; for the
noise was like that of some one half stifled, and little likely to heave
up from above him a six-feet-deep load of earth--to say nothing of the
improbability of his being able to unscrew the coffin from the inside.
Be that as it may, we cleared about a dozen of decent tombstones at
three jumps--the fourth took us over a wall five feet high within and
about fifteen without, and landed us, with a squash, in a
cabbage-garden, enclosed on the other three sides by a house and a
holly-hedge. The house was the sexton's, who, apprehending the stramash
to proceed from a resurrectionary surgeon mistaken in his latitude,
thrust out a long duck-gun from a window in the thatch, and swore to
blow out our brains if we did not instantly surrender ourselves, and
deliver up the corpse. It was in vain to cry out our name, which he knew
as well as his own. He was deaf to reason, and would not withdraw his
patterero