it builds
its nest on high rocks--sometimes on the loftiest trees--and seldom lays
more than two eggs. One is one more than enough--and we who fly by night
trust never to fall in with a live specimen of the Strix-Bubo of
Linnaeus.

But largest and loveliest of all the silent night-gliders--the SNOWY
OWL! Gentle reader--if you long to see his picture, we have told you
where it may be found;--and in the College Museum, within a glass vase
on the central table in the Palace of Stuffed Birds, you may admire his
outward very self--the semblance of the Owl he was when he used to eye
the moon shining over the Northern Sea:--but if you would see the noble
and beautiful Creature himself, in all his living glory, you must seek
him through the long summer twilight among the Orkney or the Shetland
Isles. The Snowy Owl dearly loves the snow--and there is, we believe, a
tradition among them, that their first ancestor and ancestress rose up
together from a melting snow-wreath on the very last day of a Greenland
winter, when all at once the bright fields reappear. The race still
inhabits that frozen coast--being common, indeed, through all the
regions of the Arctic Circle. It is numerous on the shores of Hudson's
Bay, in Norway, Sweden, and Lapland--but in the temperate parts of
Europe and America "rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno."

We defy all the tailors on the face of the habitable globe; and what
countless cross-legged fractional parts of men--who, like the beings of
whom they are constituents, are thought to double their numbers every
thirty years--must not the four quarters of the earth, in their present
advanced state of civilisation, contain!--we defy, we say, all the
tailors on the face of the habitable globe to construct such a surtout
as that of the Snowy Owl, covering him, with equal luxury and comfort,
in summer's heat and winter's cold. The elements, in all their freezing
fury, cannot reach the body of the bird through that beautiful
down-mail. Well guarded are the opening of those great eyes. Neither the
driving dust, nor the searching sleet, nor the sharp frozen snow-stour,
give him the ophthalmia. Gutta Serena is to him unknown--no Snowy Owl
was ever couched for cataract--no need has he for an oculist, should he
live an hundred years; and were they to attempt any operation on his
lens or iris, how he would hoot at Alexander and Wardrope!

Night, doubtless, is the usual season of his prey; but he does n