silent deliberation by seeing three magpies upon
the roof of a thatched cottage, one of the elder
boys, with pale face and white lips, assuring the
others that there, would soon be a death in that
house. A wild lad having soon afterwards died
in the next house, some two hundred yards off,
we were seriously assured that the magpies had
only perched on the cottage where we saw them
because they had been driven away from the
abode on which they first alighted and rested as
messengers of death. Among the prodigies
which Shakespeare makes King Henry say
accompanied the birth of the Duke of Gloucester,
are the cries of owls, dogs, crows, ravens, and
pies:

The owl shrieked at thy birth, an evil sign;
The night crow cried, aboding luckless time;
Dogs howl'd, and hideous tempests shook down trees;
The raven rook'd her on the chimney's top,
And chattering pies in dismal discords sung.

But the raven appears to have been pre-eminently
the ominous bird of our forefathers, and
of their melodious echoes the poets. Lady
Macbeth uses a popular illustration when she
exclaims:

                   The raven is hoarse that croaks
The fatal entrance of Duncan under my battlements.

Woden, the Scandinavian Jupiter, is called the
god of the ravens. "Three ravens," says the
prose Edda, "sit on Odin's shoulders and whisper
in his ear the tidings and events they have heard
and witnessed." They are called Hugin and
Munin (Mind and Memory). He sends them
at dawn to fly over the whole world, and they
return at eve towards meat-time. Hence it is
that Odin knows so many things, and is called
the Raven's God (Krafnagud).

Old fables have often some truth connected
with them, and when the Arabs say Mahomet
turned the crow from white to black for
croaking "ghar, ghar, ghar" (cave, cave, cave),
in order to direct his pursuing enemies to
the cave in which he was hiding, the fable
probably points to a period when Albinism
prevailed among the Arabian crows. The
English word croak is the Syrian name of the raven;
and it is not to be supposed that a crow could
not cry "ghar," for they have more variety in
their notes, even when untrained by man, than
they get credit for: sixty different notes having
been counted. White ravens often occur.
Ravens with white patches are described by
several ornithologists; and white crows, white
rooks, and white ravens, have been seen
occasionally.

Rooks can imitate the note of the jackdaw or
the bark of the dog. During the early hours of
winter mornings rooks haunt a field under my
bedroom window, and I can, as I lie awake,
distinguish the notes of the cocks, hens, and young.
Macgillivray, visiting a rookery at night, was
greatly surprised at the variety of notes emitted
by the rooks, instead of their monotonous kr-a-a.
When still some distance from the rookery, he
stopped to listen, and was surprised to hear
several rooks uttering a variety of soft, clear,
modulated notes, plainly expressive of the affection
and desire to please, of the fondling and
coaxing going on between the newly-hatched
young and their mothers. As he advanced, all
became still, and when a loud warning croak was
heard several times, first the males and then
the females flew up, wheeling above the trees,
and all the shrill voices of the young became
mute. As he left, he heard the rooks settling on
their nests. Croaks of anger, pantings of fear,
dissatisfied grunts, and flappings of wings,
contrasted with the soft low notes he had heard by
surprise.

Montaigne says beasts have language; we, it
is true, understand nothing of it; but whose
fault is that? They may deem us stupid (bestes),
as we think them. But Dupont de Nemours
would not confess this stupidity, for one imagining
he understood it. And to teach, if possible, to
others somewhat of this language, he published
translations of the songs of the nightingale
(Chansons du Rossignol), and the Crows'
Dictionary (Dictionnaire des Corbeaux). Mr. A.
E. Knox says the disturbed raven cries " Oh!"

Captain M'Clure, the Arctic voyager, says
the raven may be seen, when the winter is so
cold that wine is frozen within a yard of the
fire, winging his way through the air as
vigorously as if he were breathing the soft and warm
atmosphere of an English spring. Two ravens
once established themselves as friends of the
family in Mercer Bay for the sake of the scraps
of food thrown to them by the men. But the
ship's dog resenting this infringement of his
vested rights, used to fly at them, trying to
catch them with his mouth. Observing this,
they were wont, just when the mess-tins were
being cleared out on the dust-heap, to throw
themselves intentionally in his way, and when
he sprang at them fly only a few yards off; and
when the dog made another run they made
another flight, until they had lured, tempted, and
provoked him to the shore a considerable
distance. They then flew swiftly to the ship and
the dust-heap, and had generally picked out the
best scraps, and made no small way in devouring
the whole, before the return of the outwitted
and mortified-looking dog.

Instead of regarding ravens, crows, or rooks,
as birds silly enough to be bamboozled by a fox,
the tendency of serious narratives and authentic
observations is to give us very high ideas of
their intelligence. They have a very intense
and a very intelligent hatred to foxes. Mr.
Waterton says of the crow (C. corone), "Many
an hour of delight do I experience, when, having
mounted up to the top of a favourite oak which
grows on the border of a swamp, I see him
chasing the heron and the windhover through
the liquid void until they are lost in the
distance. Then again how eager is his pursuit!
—low loud his croaking!—how inveterate his
hostility!—when he has espied a fox stealing
away from the hounds under the covert of some
friendly hedge."
Rooks are said to be so very sagacious that