“Peaceful was the night
Wherein the Prince of Light
His reign of peace upon the earth began;
The winds with wonder whist,
Smoothly the waters kiss’d,
Whispering new joys to the wild ocean,
Which now hath quite forgot to rave,
While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave.”

The word halcyon is Greek and signifies brooding on the sea, as it was formerly believed that the kingfisher laid its eggs in a floating nest upon the sea. Drayton writes, for example, of

“The halcyon, whom the sea obeys
When she her nest upon the water lays.”

While Dryden, to quote one more instance, says:

“Amidst our arms as quiet you shall be
As halcyon brooding on a winter’s sea.”

This exceptional favour fair Halcyone owes to her close relationship with Æolus, since with him rested the power to lash the waves to fury or to soothe them to rest. This beautiful Greek myth doubtless underlies the superstition as to the dead body of the kingfisher indicating the direction of the wind, though probably it never occurs to the rustic meteorologist as he watches his revolving kingfisher that any idea of the loving Halcyone turning to greet the coming Æolus enters into the philosophy of his test.

It was for centuries a belief that storks fed with filial care their aged parents. Thus Heywood, writing in the year 1635, asserts in “The Hierachie of the Blessed Angells” that

“The indulgent storke, who builds her nest on hye
(Observ’d for her alternat pietie),
Doth cherish her unfeather’d young and feed them,
And looks from them the like, when she should need them.
(That’s when she grows decrepit, old, and weake)
Nor doth her pious Issue cov’nant breeke:
For unto her, being hungry, food she brings,
And being weake, supports her on her wings.”

One meets with the same notion again in Beaumont, where he asserts that

“The stork’s an emblem of true piety:
Because, when age has seized and made his dam
Unfit for flight, the grateful young one takes
His mother on his back, provides her food,
Repaying thus her tender care for him,
Ere he was fit to fly.”

The extraordinary idea that storks were found only in countries having a republican form of government held its ground for a considerable time, though it would appear as though nothing could have been simpler than its prompt disproof.

Cranes, it was believed, bore stones with them when they were migrating, in order that they might not be swept out of their course by the wind. A somewhat parallel notion was that swallows in their annual migrations carried in their bills, when about to cross the sea, a piece of stick, to be laid upon the water from time to time as a convenient resting place. The idea of the cranes steadying themselves in flight by a ballasting of small rock was too quaintly happy a conception not to bear amplification, so we find that the bees, the never-failing emblems of industry and wisdom, were equally ready to avail themselves of the notion. “Bees that are emploied in carrying of honie chuse alwaies to have the wind with them if they can. If haply there do arise a tempest whiles they bee abroad they catch up some little stonie greet to ballaise and poise themselves against the wind. Some say that they take it and lay it upon their shoulders.” How the little stony grit maintains this latter position the old authors do not stop to explain. In the Georgics of Virgil we find a reference to this, which evidently even then was an old and unchallenged belief, in the lines:—

“And oft with pebbles, like a balanced boat,
Poised through the air on even pinions float”—

and the idea reappears from time to time as a fact in natural history. There is so much that is legitimately wonderful in bee-arrangements that it is scarcely strange that some of the details given by ancient and mediæval naturalists in praise of their sagacity, and other estimable qualities, should overreach the possibilities, and fail in the not unimportant element of truth.⁠[99]

The sagacious cranes seem to have found several valuable uses for their pieces of rock. We are told that while the main body are resting at night, sentinels are posted to guard against surprise, so that the flock or covey, or whatever else may be the proper technical term to use, rest in full assurance of safety. To insure the necessary vigilance, these sentinels stand upon one foot, and hold in the other a large stone.⁠[100] Should they inadvertently nod, the muscles relax and the stone drops, and by the slight noise it makes awakens them to a proper sense of their duty and their temporary lapse from it.

A third valuable use that the cranes seem to have found for stones was to put them in their mouths when migrating, so that thus gagged they might not make a noise, and by their cries bring the eagles and other birds of prey upon themselves.⁠[101] In the “Euphues,” we find a passage that admirably illustrates the belief in these two latter uses of the stone, as the author would naturally not use similes that would be unfamiliar to his readers. “What I haue done,” he writes, “was onely to keep myselfe from sleepe, as the Crane doth the stone in hir foote; and I would also, with the same Crane, that I had been silent, holding a stone in my mouth.”

It will be sufficiently evident that the birds we have mentioned are but few in number. It would be extremely difficult to make our treatment exhaustive, extremely easy to make it exhausting; we would desire in pity to our readers to avoid either of these alternatives. We would therefore steer straight for the proverbial third course, and trust that it may be held that we have found a happy medium in resting satisfied with the comparatively few species of birds that are here brought under notice.