GLOW-WORMS, SNAYLES, and all such creatures, do appear most against fair weather; but if Worms come out of the Earth much in the day-time, it is a presage of wet weather; but in the Summer evenings it foreshews dewy nights, and hot days to follow."

It is a very unfortunate thing, notes Melton, for a man to meet early in the morning "an ill-favoured man or woman, a rough-footed hen, a shag-haird dog, or a black cat."

The Scots of old, according to Shaw's History of Moray, attended much to omens in their expeditions. An armed man meeting them was a good omen. If a woman barefoot crossed the road before them, they seized her and fetched blood from her forehead. If a deer, fox, hare, or any beast of game appeared, and they did not kill it, it was an unlucky omen.

Some will defer going abroad, writes Defoe in the Memoirs of Duncan Campbel, however urgent the business, if, on setting out, they are met by a person who has the misfortune to squint. "This accident turns them immediately back, and perhaps, by delaying till another time what requires an immediate despatch, the affair goes wrong, and the omen is indeed fulfilled, which, but for the superstition of the observer, would have been of no effect."

"The meeting of monks," writes Gaule, "is commonly accounted as an ill omen, and so much the rather if it be early in the morning; because these kind of men live for the most part by the suddain death of men, as vultures do by slaughters ;" and we gather from a remarkable treatise entitled The Schoolemaster or Teacher of Table Philosophy (1583), that in the ages of Chivalry it was accounted unlucky to encounter a priest, on the eve of setting out upon a warlike expedition, or for a tournament. This last superstition is included by Gaule in a lengthy enumeration of Vain Observations; among which are the lifting of the left leg over the threshold on first going out of doors; the meeting of a beggar or a priest the first thing in the morning; the meeting of a virgin or a harlot first; the running in of a child between two friends; jostling one another unawares; treading upon another's toes; meeting one fasting that is lame or defective in any member; and washing in the same water after another.

It may not be uninstructive to introduce here some of the superstitions current among the natives of Malabar, as they are embodied in Phillips' Account published in 1717 :

"It is interpreted as a very bad sign if a blind man, a Brahmin, or a washerwoman meets one in the way; as also when one meets a man with an empty panel, or when one sees an oil-mill; or if a man meets us with his head uncovered, or when one hears a weeping voice, or sees a fox crossing the way, or a dog running on his right hand; or when a poor man meets us in our way, or when a cat crosses our way moreover, when any earthen-pot maker or widow meets us, we interpret it in the worst sense: when one sprains his foot, falls on his head, or is called back. Presently the professors of prognostication are consulted, and they turn to the proper chapter for such a sign, and give the interpretation of it."

THE OWL.

If an owl, which is reckoned a most abominable and unlucky bird, send forth its hoarse and dismal voice, it is ominous, says Bourne, of the approach of some terrible thing, of some dire calamity or great misfortune. This omen is particularised in Chaucer's Assembly of Fools

"The jelous swan ayenst hys deth that singeth,
The oule eke, that of Deth the bode bringeth;"

And Spenser also refers to it

Again

"The rueful strich still wayting on the beere,
The whistler shrill, that whoso heares doth die."

"The ill-faced owle, Death's dreadful messenger."

According to Pennant's Zoology, the appearance of the eagle-owl in cities was deemed an unlucky omen. Rome itself once underwent a lustration owing to the straying of one into the Capitol; which event Butler commemorates

"The Roman Senate, when within
The city walls an owl was seen,
Did cause their clergy with lustrations
(Our Synod calls humiliations)
The roundfaced prodigy t' avert

From doing town and country hurt."

The ancients indeed held the eagle-owl in the utmost abhorrence, regarding it, like the screech-owl, as the messenger of death. Virgil records that it was the solitary owl that foretold the tragic end of the unhappy queen of Carthage; and Suetonius, it has been remarked, who took it into his head to relate all the imaginary prodigies which preceded the deaths of his twelve Cæsars, never misses an opportunity of rendering justice to the prophetic character of some one bird or other; even the philosophic Tacitus yielding to the folly. Alexander ab Alexandro is loud in condemnation of the bird; writing of it: "Maxime vero abominatus est Bubo, tristis et dira avis, voce funesta et gemitu, qui formidilosa, dirasque necessitates et magnos moles instare portendit;" while Pliny calls it "inauspicata et funebris avis," as well as "funebris et Noctis monstrum ; " Ovid, "dirum mortalibus omen;" Lucan, "sinister ;" and Claudian, "infestus." So also in the treatise De Proprietatibus Rerum (1536) we read: "Divinours telle that they betokyn evyll; for if the owle be seen in a citie, it signifyeth distruccion and waste, as Isidore sayth. The cryenge of the owle by nyght tokeneth deathe, as divinours conjecte and deme;" and Gaule's catalogue of Vain Observations and Superstitious Ominations thereupon includes "The owles scritching."

Pennant observes that the tawny owl is the variety on which the appellation of screech has been bestowed, and to which the folly of superstition has ascribed the power of presaging death by its cries. Thus an old Play in Reed's collection admonishes us—

"When screech-owls croak upon the chimney-tops,

It's certain then you of a corse shall hear."

A screech-owl at midnight, writes the Spectator, has alarmed a family more than a band of robbers; and Grose tells us that one flapping its wings against the windows of a sick person's chamber, or screeching thereat, portends the early death of some member of the family.

In the Arcana Microcosmi of Alexander Ross we are supplied with classic illustrations as well as personal testimony. Among other prodigies presaging the death of the Emperor Valentinian, he writes: "Lampridius and Marcellinus mention an owl that sat upon the top of the house in which he used to bathe, and would not leave its station though stones were thrown at it." Further, Julius Obsequens (in his Book of Prodigies) shows that, a short time before the death of Commodus, an owl was observed to sit upon the top of his chamber, both at Rome and at Sanuvium; and Xiphilinus, treating of the prodigies that heralded the death of Augustus, says an owl sang on the summit of the Curia; the Actian War, according to the same authority, being presignified by the flying of owls into the Temple of Concord. "In the year 1542," proceeds Ross, "at Herbipolis (or Wirtzburg) in Franconia this unlucky bird by his screeching songs affrighted the citizens a long time together, and immediately followed a great plague, war, and other calamities;" while Ross's personal testimony is that he observed that an owl groaning in the window of a house in which he lodged "presaged the death of two eminent persons, who died there shortly after."

One of Willsford's Nature's Secrets is: "Owls whooping after sunset, and in the night, foreshews a fair day to ensue; but, if she names herself in French (Huette), expect then fickle and unconstant weather, but most usually rain;" and Mason, in his Anatomie of Sorcerie, ridicules the superstition of his contemporaries who were "the markers of the flying or noise of foules; as they which prognosticate death by the croaking of ravens or the hideous crying of owles in the night." Shakespeare embodies the popular tradition in his Julius Cæsar

"The bird of Night did sit

Even at noon-day upon the market-place,

Hooting and shrieking;"

and in Marston's Antonio and Mellida (1603) the nocturnal scene is thus presented

""Tis yet dead Night, yet all the earth is cloucht

In the dull leaden hand of snoring sleepe :

No breath distrusts the quiet of the aire,

No Spirit moves upon the breast of Earth

Save howling dogs, night crowes, and screeching owles,
Save meagre Ghosts, Piero, and blacke Thoughts."

See a remarkable account of an owl that disturbed Pope John XXIV. at a Council held at Rome.-Fasciculus Rerum expetendarum et fugiendarum,

The superstition is satirised in the portraiture of The Country Cunning Man, in Rowlands' Antonio and Mellida (1603) —

"Wise Gosling did but hear the Scrich Owle crie,
And told his Wife, and straight a Pigge did die.
Another time (after that scurvie Owle)
When Ball, his Dog, at twelve o'clocke did howle,
He jog'd his Wife, and ill lucke, Madge did say,
And Fox by morning stole a Goose away;"

and in the Athenian Oracle the same strain of satire is happily pursued; the query "Why rats, toads, ravens, screech-owls, &c., are ominous, and how they came to foreknow fatal events?" being answered in this wise. Premising that, had the querist said unlucky instead of ominous, he might easily have met with satisfaction, the writer proceeds to explain that the rat is unlucky because he destroys many a good Cheshire cheese; the toad, because it poisons; and the raven and screech-owl, because, like cats when about their courtship, they make an ugly noise, to the disturbance of the neighbourhood. The instinct of rats in leaving an old ship is explained to mean that they cannot be dry in it, and in quitting an old house, because perhaps they want victuals; while ravens are much such prophets as conjurors or almanack-makers, foretelling events after they have come to pass; and their following great armies is represented to be after the manner of vultures, not as foreboding battle but for the dead men, dogs, horses, and the like, which must daily be left behind on the march.

RAVENS, CROWS, WOODPECKERS, KITES, CRANES, AND HERONS.

A vulgar respect, writes Pennant, is paid to the raven, as being the bird appointed by Heaven to feed the prophet Elijah when he fled from the rage of Ahab.

Moresinus includes the croaking of ravens among omens; and in Hall's Characters we read of the superstitious man that, "if he heare but a raven croke from the next roofe, he makes his will," while "he listens in the morning whether the crow crieth even or odd, and by that token presageth the weather." Spenser refers to

"The hoarse Night Raven, trompe of doleful dreere."

In Gay's Dirge we have

"The boding raven on her cottage sate,

And with hoarse croakings warn'd us of our fate ;"

and in Othello

"Oh! it comes o'er my memory

As doth the raven o'er the infected house,
Boding to all."

So again, in Marston's Antonio and Mellida—

"Now barkes the Wolfe against the full checkt Moone,
Now Lyons halfe-clam'd Entrals roare for food.

Now croaks the Toad, and Night Crowes screech aloud,
Fluttering 'bout Casements of departing Soules,

Now gapes the Graves, and through their Yawnes let loose
Imprison'd Spirits to revisit Earth."

In the Arcana Microcosmi of Ross we are instructed that both public and private calamities and death have been portended by ravens; Jovianus Pontanus relating two terrible skirmishes between ravens and kites in the fields lying between Beneventum and Apicium, which prognosticated a great battle to be fought there; and Nicetas writing of a skirmish between crows and ravens, which presignified the irruption of the Scythians into Thracia. Ross further testifies to personal familiarity with examples of men being thus forewarned of their death; his words being: "I have not only heard and read, but have likewise observed divers times;" mentioning, as "a late example," the case of a young gentleman named Draper, an intimate friend of his, who had, "on a sudden, one or two ravens in his chamber, which had been quarrelling upon the top of the chimney. These he apprehended as messengers of his death; and so they were, for he died shortly after." Cicero, Ross goes on to say, was forewarned by the noise and fluttering of ravens about him that his end was near; while, in Trajan's time, a crow in the Capitol, using the Greek language for the purpose, solemnly assured its hearers that all should be well. "He that employed a raven to be the feeder of Elias," is the comment, "may employ the same bird as a messenger of death to others."

Macaulay, the historian of St. Kilda, observes that, ravens being accounted the most prophetic of inspired birds, the foresight of a raven became a proverbial expression in the district, to denote preternatural sagacity in predicting fortuitous events. In Greece and Italy, he notes, ravens were sacred to Apollo, the great patron of Augurs, and were called the companions and attendants of that deity. "According to some writers, a great number of crows fluttered about Cicero's head, on the very day he was murdered by the ungrateful Popilius Lænas, as if to warn him of his approaching fate; and one of them, after having made its way into his chamber, pulled away his very bedclothes, from a solicitude for his safety."

In the treatise De Proprietatibus Rerum by Bartholomæus we read: "And as Divinours mene the Raven hath a maner Virtue of meanyng and tokenynge of Divination. And therefore, among Nations, the Raven among Foules was halowed to Apollo, as Mercius saythe."

Pennant quotes the authority of Virgil in behalf of the statement that the croaking of the carrion crow betokened rain, and that it was held to be a bird of bad omen, especially if it happened to be seen on the left hand; to which circumstance Butler's interrogation may be taken to refer

"Is it not ominous in all countries

When crows and ravens croak upon trees?"

Similarly writes Bourne: If a crow cry, it portends some evil; and one of Gaule's Vain Observations is: "A crow lighting on the right