chaste and affectionate and constant as the snow-white dove itself." Next have we
"The careful stork, since Adam wondered at
For thankfulness to those where he doth breed;"
for—as Drayton explains to us in an aside—"the stork used to build on houses, leaveth ever one behind him for the owner." This is illustrated by a yet living creed.[1] In North Germany and in Swabia people sometimes prepare a nest for a stork by twisting boughs about the spokes of an old cart-wheel. It is said that when this is done the grateful bird gives a feather the first year of its tenancy, an egg the second, and a young stork the third, by way of rent; it then repeats the series. Our attention is now called to—
"the loving pelican,
Whose young ones poison'd by the serpent's sting,
With her own blood to life again doth bring."
The bird likewise points a moral in The Owl.[2] "In her piety," or "vulning herself," as heralds have it, the pelican was much used in mediæval sculpture, &c.,[3] as a figure of Him who was pierced that His children might be saved, by His blood, from the power of the Serpent. That close observer to whom we have lately turned, Mr. Waterton, utterly discredits the idea of the young birds being nourished from their mother's veins, and the story referred to by Drayton deserves to be similarly treated by all who are of the Gradgrind way of thinking. "'Tis a wonder—a strange wonder,"—writes the naturalist,[4] "how such a tale as this could ever be believed. Still we see representations of it in pictures drawn by men of science. But enough of infant pelicans, sucking their mamma in the nursery. I consign them to the fostering care of my great-grandmothers."
"There came the halcyon whom the sea obeys,
When she her nest upon the water lays,"
a fiction, this, which took great hold on Drayton's fancy, and was
- ↑ "Bird Lore," All the Year Round, new series, vol. xx. p. 368.
- ↑ [iv. 1303-4].
- ↑ Sometimes the bird represented is like unto a vulture. Some interesting correspondence on this point may be read in The Academy of Feb. 9th, Feb. 16th, and April 5th, 1884.
- ↑ Essays on Natural History, 3rd series, p. 26.
