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Among its leaves was a monstrous jackdaw that watched Julian intently, and here and there, between the branches, appeared great, fiery sparks as if the sky were raining all its stars upon the forest. But the sparks were the eyes of wild-cats, owls, squirrels, monkeys and parrots.
And you opened on them the eyes of owls, and said, "It must be the sunshine." You could only go on saying, "The sun, the sun." That was what the man in Ibsen said, when he had lost his wits. I stood looking at the Coronation Procession—I mean the one in Beaconsfield; not the rather elephantine imitation of it which, I believe, had some success in London—and I was seriously impressed.
The projecting wires of the feet were put through gimlet holes in the perch and made firm, and Si's Owls were ready for their positions. They were now the most ridiculous looking things imaginable, wings floppy, heads hanging. "Here is where the artist comes in," said Si proudly, conscious that this was himself.
He quotes a writer who supposes that it may be fear that operates upon the birds when they perceive the Owls flitting among the trees, and that they sing, as a timid person whistles in a lonely place, to quiet their fears. But the musical notes of birds are never used by them to express their fears; they are the language of love, sometimes animated by jealousy.
We had before us representatives of five different peoples, five different types of costume, each quite unlike the others. All five are known to us in ethnography under the generic name of Hindus. Similarly eagles, condors, hawks, vultures, and owls are known to ornithology as "birds of prey," but the analogous differences are as great.
How must the devoted pair exult, when, in spite of owls and hawks, squirrels and weasels, small boys and full-grown oölogists, they have finally reared a brood of offspring! The long uncertainty and the thousand perils only intensify the joy.
Here and there the inhabitants disputed with one another, uttering harsh words in shrill voices. Here and there were temples of gods bearing devices of owls and other birds. Resounding with the tinkle of iron bells, the hamlet abounded with canine packs standing or lying on every side.
But not a finger's-breadth was it yet open: Then did a roaring wind tear the folds apart: whistling, whizzing, and piercing, it threw unto me a black coffin. And in the roaring, and whistling, and whizzing the coffin burst up, and spouted out a thousand peals of laughter. And a thousand caricatures of children, angels, owls, fools, and child-sized butterflies laughed and mocked, and roared at me.
Plato ingeniously compares Socrates to the gallipots of the Athenian apothecaries; the grotesque figures of owls and apes were painted on their exterior, but they contained within precious balsams.
The darkness thickened; the remnants of the magnificent feast lay like that nocturnal banquet to which the ghosts of the departed must gather when evoked at the festival of the Forefathers.96 Now the owls had cried thrice from the garret, like conjurers; they seemed to greet the rising of the moon of which the form fell through the window on the table, trembling like a spirit in Purgatory; from the vaults beneath rats leapt out through holes, like the souls of the damned; they gnawed and drank; at times in a corner a forgotten champagne bottle would pop as a toast to the spirits.
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