SUPERSTITIONS ABOUT ANIMALS
The robin is very fortunate in the superstitious which attach to it. The legend which attributes its red breast to his having attended our Lord upon the cross, when some of His blood was sprinkled on it, may have died out of the memory of country-folk; but still
'There's a divinity doth hedge—a robin,'
which keeps it from innumerable harms.
His nest is safe from the most ruthless bird-nesting boy. 'You must not take robin's eggs; if you do, you will get your legs broken,' is the saying in Suffolk. And, accordingly, you will never find their eggs on the long strings of which boys are so proud.
Their lives, too, are generally respected. 'It is unlucky to kill a robin.' 'How badly you write,' I said one day to a boy in our parish school;�?your hand shakes so that you can't hold the pen steady. Have you been running hard, or anything of that sort?' 'No,' replied the lad, 'it always shakes; I once had a robin die in my hand; and they say that if a robin dies in your hand, it will always shake.'
The cross on the donkey's back is still connected in the rustic mind with our Lord's having ridden upon one into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday; and I wish that it procured him better treatment than he usually meets with.
[A good many years ago a writer in Blackwood's Magazine, adverting to the fact that the ass must have borne this mark before the time of Christ, suggested that it might be a premonition of the honour which was afterwards to befall the species. But the naturalist comes rather roughly across this pleasant fancy, when he tells that the cross stripe is, as it were, the evanishment in this species of the multitude of stripes which we see in the allied species, the zebra.-Swainson's Zoology.]
It is lucky for you that martins should build against your house, for they will never come to one where there is strife. Soon after setting up housekeeping for myself, I was congratulated on a martin having built its nest in the porch over my front door.
It is unlucky to count lambs before a certain time; if you do, they will be sure not to thrive. With this may be compared the popular notion of the character of David's sin in numbering the people of Israel and Judah, related in the last chapter of the Second Book of Samuel—a narrative which makes some people look with suspicion and dislike upon our own decennial census.
It is unlucky to kill a harvest man, i.e., one of those long-legged spiders which one sees scrambling about, perfectly independent of cobwebs: if you do kill one, there will be a bad harvest.
If there are superstitions about animals, it is satisfactory to find them leaning to the side of humanity; but the poor hedgehog finds to his cost that the absurd notion of his sucking the teats of cows serves as a pretext for the most cruel treatment.
It is currently believed that if you put horsehairs into a spring they will turn to eels. A few months ago, a labouring man told a friend of mine that 'he knew it was so, for he had proved it.' He had put a number of horsehairs into a spring near his house, and in a short time it was full of young eels.
Mermaids are supposed to abound in the ponds and ditches in this neighbourhood. Careful mothers use them as bugbears to prevent little children from going too near the water. I once asked a child what mermaids were, and he was ready with his answer at once, 'Them nasty things what crome you (i. e., hook you) into the water!' Another child has told me, 'I see one wunst, that was a grit big thing Mike a feesh.' Very probably it may have been a pike, basking in the shallow water. Uncaught fish are very likely to have their weight and size exaggerated. Everybody knows what enormous fish those are which anglers lose. A man has told me of carp, that he could ' compare them to nothing but great fat hogs,' which I have afterwards caught in a drag-net, and found to be suit more than four pounds weight. No wonder, then, that a little child, with its mind prepared to believe in mermaids, should have seen something big enough for one in a pike.
The saying about magpies is well known
'One, sorrow;
Two, mirth;
Three, a wedding;
Four, death.'
And it is a curious thing that, as the man said about the horsehairs being turned into cels,-' I have proved it;' for, as I was on my way to be married, travelling upon a coach-top to claim my bride the next day, three magpies—neither more nor less-flew across the road.
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