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and older legends still say that it lies under Noah's curse, because, when the other birds came of their own accord into the Ark, it alone gave trouble and had to be caught. Magpie-lore is far too extensive to admit of my going into it, but it is worth noting that it ail tends more or less directly to the bird's discredit. Yet the country-side holds no more conspicuous ornament than the magpie, nor is there any one bird that gives more gaiety to the scene than it.

Moreover, the very superstitions which reflect upon its character, and which the poets reproduce in their verse, are themselves inaccurate. Thus, one which Halliwell reproduces, to illustrate the popular idea of the magpie's self-conceit, is based upon the error that the magpie's nest is an unfinished structure; whereas, on the contrary, it not only has all that other birds have, but a roof overhead as well. It is, in fact, twice as good as any other large bird's, and the legend is therefore foolish. Says Dallas: "The nest of the magpie is more artificially constructed than that of the other crows.' It is usually constructed in high trees, but sometimes in thick hedges. It is large and of an oval form, composed externally of sharp thorny twigs, which form a complete dome over the top, leaving a small opening at one side for the ingress and egress of the bird. The inside is plastered with a layer of mud, and the bottom lined with grass and fibrous roots to form a soft receptacle for the eggs and young. The male and female sit on the eggs alternately." Again, the popular rhyme about magpies and their appearance, generally supposed (from the uncertainty about the actual wording of the doggerel) to be suggestive of sinister prognostication, is really the reverse; for, except a single magpie, any number up to six is lucky, and even beyond that, in more than one version, the congregation of pies is auspicious.

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It is only when we arrive at the magical number of nine, that the poor Pierides become awkward things to meet. Abroad, it does not suffer under the same proscription as with us, and it receives a fair proportion of the regard to which its exceptional intelligence, its undoubted usefulness to man, and its beauty entitle it. All over Scandinavia, for instance, it is "the bird of good luck," the genius loc and therefore a popular favourite, a public protégé.

About the rooks few poets had any very positive ideas. A great many of them knew the bird personally, of course, for even those who cared least about nature, and lived in cities, had had rooks thrust under their observation at one time or another. They appear, however, to have been struck only with three points-that the rooks "cawed;" that when they flew in any number they formed “a blackening train ;" that when you fired into a rookery the birds were in uproar; and that they built nests. For this last performance the rook is repeatedly admired as "busy." The cawing was not so much to the poets' taste. Most of them thought it too "clamorous." Thomson says it is "discordant" (but elsewhere "amusive"); Pope, "croaking;" Cunningham addresses it as "Bird of Discord ;" while Longfellow (but he is speaking of American rooks) says its caw" is "a sound of woe." Cowper and one or two besides are civil to the bird, but the majority tar it with their crow-brush, and so dismiss it. Scott, meaning the rook, says,-

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Hoarse into middle air arose
The vespers of the roosting crows;

and Burns talks of

The blackening train of crows
Winging their way to their repose.

Now, the rook is an admirable fowl. Prior, who calls it "honest," is far more right than Gay, who calls it "thievish." In industry, the farmer has few such friends, or the insect world such foes. Up in the morning, before the dew is off the grass, the rooks are hard at work, disposing of that "first worm" which proverbially falls to the lot of the early bird, and of the winged things of sunshine which, when saturated with moisture, are unable to rise from the ground. As soon as the men

1 It seems at first sight strange that, with such wandering habits, the phrase "straight as a crow" should be adopted to mark distances in a straight line across the open country; yet, when it is borne in mind how many persons confound the crow with the rook, and even talk of "the crows in a rookery," the suggestion will at once occur to the mind that the term owed its origin to its far gentler and more respectable relation, the rook, whose evening flights are among the most familiar sights of the country, and are invariably performed in a line so straight, that if a whole flock could be tracked through the air on any one evening, it would be found scarcely to deviate from that of the preceding or the following. It is to be feared that this inaccurate application of names has done the rook ill service; yet the two birds are totally distinct. Crows are solitary birds, rarely seen in more than pairs together; rooks are eminently sociable. Crows shun the haunts of men; rooks court the vicinity of his dwellings. Crows are carnivorous; rooks chiefly insectivorous. (British Birds in their Haunts, Rev. C. A. Johns.)

are afield the rook goes to them and follows the plough with the eye of an Inquisitor. Like detectives, they are perpetually on the prowl to apprehend some one, and woe to the insect, grub or beetle, whose evil ways are discovered. There is no appeal from a rook. It holds its sessions when it chooses, and they may look for summary procedure who come before this rural justice. In folk-lore, they hold an honourable place, for they are said to connect themselves with the fortunes of families, deserting their elms when disaster overtakes the house; and Cosmo di Medici, visiting England two centuries ago, was especially struck by the pride our peerage took in its rookeries; "for these birds," said he, "are of good omen." It is a pity the poets did not know more about this bird, or they might have been more in accord with our prose writers, who have multiplied their praises of the cheery, homely English rook. Its "pleasing clamour" alone has a literature to itself.

Passing from these instances of the poets' unsympathetic regard, we come to three birds-near relations of the jay, jackdaw, and magpie-which are objects of positive aversion to the poets. These are the chough, the crow, and the raven.

The first of these can be dismissed in a very few words, for the only poets who refer to it call it "ominous" and "obscene," giving the reader the idea that they did not like to have much to do with it. Yet, strangely enough, both fable and superstition are very kind to the chough. In Cornwall, for instance, they transfer the legend of the raven-that King Arthur's spirit entered that bird after death -to its red-legged kinsman.

For mark yon bird of sable wing,

Talons and beak all red as blood;

The spirit of the long-lost king

Passed in that shape from Camian's flood.
And still when loudliest howls the storm,
And darkliest lowers his native sky,
The king's fierce soul is in that form,
The warrior-spirit threatens nigh.

There is surely something of dignity in this tradition that makes the poets' calumniation of "the russet-pated chough "" seem out of sympathy with popular sentiment. In fable, again, the only reference to the bird is to its credit, where the peacock, disappointed with its own terminations, suggests to the chough that they should exchange legs; but the chough prefers remaining as it is rather than fly in the face of Nature by swopping its red stockings for some of the gaiety of the Bird of Juno. In the world of Nature, and outside the verses of the bards, the chough is a delightful bird, and its appearance,

demeanour, flight, and habits are all alike prepossessing; while its admirable strength of character, courage, and fidelity in attachment, commend it to an even larger measure of regard.

The crow, I regret to feel, has a terrible score to wipe off, for the whole world has conspired to speak ill of it. In the oldest Vedas will be found the narrative of the crow's Fall from Paradise, and the most ancient of the Cinghalese writings tells us of the Original Sin of the crow. "In wrath for their tale-bearing-for had they not carried abroad the secrets of the Councils of the Gods?—Indra hurled them down through all the hundred stories of his heaven;" and the Pratyasataka tells us that nothing can improve a crow. Both Greece and Rome knew of the transgression that lost this bird Olympus, and deprived the artistic Apollo of his favourite. Modern legend busies itself no less with the trespass that turned the crow's plumage black; scorching this bird, once as beautiful as the Phoenix, into the cinder that it is. Is there not in Norway "the Hill of Bad Spirits," where the souls of wicked men fly about in the likeness of crows? and is there not also in Sweden "the Place of Crows and Devils"? In Thibet there is an evil city of crows, and Hiawatha knew of a land of dead crow-men. All the schoolmen are agreed that they are actually imps; and have we not a long list of learned names to support this point? while the dreary chronicle of their misdeeds is as long as history. Indeed, wherever we look in literature, either prose or verse, we find "the treble-dated bird" the subject of obloquy.

Shakespeare calls it "ribald;" Prior, "foreboding;" Dyer, "lurking;" Churchill and Gay, "strutting;" Dryden, "dastard;" Cowley, "ignoble," and so forth; while the generality simply jeer at its voice or dismiss it as "the carrion crow." Once only does he arrive at honour in poetry, and that is by a ludicrous substitution of crows for ravens in the miracle of the Tishbite's sustenance. Says Green,

The honoured prophet

Did, more than angels, greet the crows that brought him bread and meat.

As a bird of omen-from the time when, as Churchill says,

Among the Romans not a bird
Without a prophecy was heard;
And every crow was to the state

A sure interpreter of fate,

to the modern day, when the poet asks,

Is it not ominous in all countries

When crows or ravens croak on trees?---

the crow has been one of the black-art birds, a thing for witches to make a familiar of, and for man to dread. Yet, in spite of the lamentable facts I have cited above, I should be reluctant to deny this bird every one of the virtues. At any rate, Menu, the great lawgiver of the Hindoos, says "a good wife should be like a crow"and if any one ought to know what a crow is like, it is a Hindoo. As I have said elsewhere of the Indian crow, they cannot, like young sweeps, be called "innocent blacknesses," for their nigritude is the livery of sin and the badge of crime. "Yet they do not wear their colour with humility or even common decency. On the contrary, they swagger in it, pretending they chose that exact shade for themselves. . . . In the verandahs they parade the reverend sable which they disgrace; sleek as Chadband, wily as Pecksniff. Their step is grave, and they ever seem on the point of quoting Scripture, while their eyes are wandering towards carnal matters. Like Stiggins, they keep a sharp look-out for tea-time, and hanker after flesh-pots."

Yet this much is also certain, that the crow is not only a pattern to the whole bird world of conjugal fidelity, but a model to them also in that remarkable reserve and modesty which forbids the crow, unlike all other fowls, any exhibition of conjugal tenderness before the public eye.

Moreover, they display in these communities a very remarkable sense of territorial boundaries. They sacrifice to Terminus. Thus one kind of crow keeps to one side of a river, as the Elbe, for instance, and another to the other: Chichester is the "Coconada" of the hooded crow; Brighton of the carrion crow. Whether the crows are mindful of their brilliant past or not, only the crows can tell us; but the whimsical philosopher might pretend to detect a pathetic yearning towards the bright days of old in the frequency with which these birds reproduce white plumage. Some, indeed, by hereditary obstinacy have fixed white collars round their necks (as in the Transvaal), while others (as in India) are slily mixing grey with their black. But, besides these established varieties, we find the crow constantly recurring to an albino type, and it was only the British occupation of Cyprus that put a stop to a revolution in crow colour that, if unchecked, might have landed natural history in disastrous consequences. It was then found that many of the Cypriote crows were piebald! "For many reasons, this aberration from a recognised standard was to be deplored-reasons ornithological, moral, and general. Ornithologically, it has been

The city of crows.

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