“If,” says Mr. Wilkie, “the bat is observed, while flying, to rise, and then descend again earthwards, you may know that the witches’ hour is come—the hour in which they have power over every human being who is not specially shielded from their influence.”
The raven,[1] crow, and magpie,[2] are ominous birds on the Border, as elsewhere. A North-country servant thus accounted for the unluckiness of the magpie to her master, the late Canon Humble. “It was” the girl said, “the only bird which did not go into the Ark with Noah; it liked better to sit outside, jabbering over the drowned world.” A yet quainter reason was given for it by the Durham lad, who said the magpie was a hybrid between the raven and the dove, and therefore, unlike every other bird and beast, had not been baptized in the waters of the Deluge. Yet, uncanny as the creature is, and mischievous too, there are parts of the Continent where no one dares kill it. An English traveller in Sweden once saw a flock of magpies greedily devouring the pig’s food, and, having a gun with him, offered to shoot some. He did so, and the farmer thanked him. heartily, but expressed his hopes that no harm might befall him in consequence.[3]
I received my first lesson respecting the portents to be drawn from magpies very early in life. Well do I remember, when a
- ↑ In Sweden the ravens which scream by night in forest swamps and wild moors are held to be the ghosts of murdered men, whose bodies have been hidden in those spots by their undetected murderers, and not had Christian burial. In Denmark the night raven is considered an exorcised spirit. There is a hole in its left wing, caused by the stake driven into the earth where a spirit has been exorcised. One must take care not to look up when the bird is flying overhead, for he who sees through the hole in its wing will become a night raven himself, and the night raven will be released. It is ever flying towards the east, in hopes of reaching the Holy Sepulchre, for when it arrives there it will get rest.—S. B. G.
- ↑ The magpie is considered in Sweden a downright witches’ bird, belonging to the Evil One and the other powers of night. When the witches on Walpurgis night ride to the Blakulli, they go in the form of magpies. These birds moult in summer, and become bald about the neck; and then the countrypeople say they have been to the Blakulli and helped the Evil One to get his hay in, and that the yoke has rubbed their feathers off.—Thorpe’s Mythology, vol. ii. p. 84.
- ↑ Archbishop Whately’s Remains, p. 270.
