You've heard that it's possible to toot your own horn without blowing it.  It's true, and even a scarecrow can do it.  From Mocca, 1936. 

In this detail from a vintage Hallowe'en postcard, we learn that jack-o'-lanterns are disconcerted by looming scarescrows, but black cats are not.

From Roy Blakeley's Motor Caravan by Percy Keese Fitzhugh, 1921.

"I'm afraid I'm in low company!" from Hood's Own by Thomas Hood, 1855.

Here's the best combination scarecrow, snowman, and telephone we've seen all year.  From Bell Telephone Magazine, 1944.

"The Papal scarecrow was abandoned in the fields."
—Richardson Little Wright, Forgotten Ladies (1928)

This papal scarecrow appears in Punch, 1857.

Here's a scarecrow from a 1918 issue of Life magazine.

Where your eyes don't go a filthy scarecrow waves its broomstick arms
And does a parody of each unconscious thing you do
When you turn around to look it's gone behind you
On its face it's wearing your confused expression
Where your eyes don't go.

I am afraid of this fashionable dilution of soul [by modern science].  We can lose it but, no matter how devoutly we wish to, we cannot destroy it.  The soul always returns to us, call it what we will, in whatever image we choose to remake it.  Our sin is to think that we can remake the soul in our own image because, make no mistake, it will return to us in the nightmare scarecrow shape of that sin.  Stifle the soul and it returns as madness; cast it out and it comes back as terror.