It is not easy in preparing a book devoted mainly to fable and folklore to sort out material for a separate chapter on “legends.” A legend may be defined as a narrative of something thought of as having actually happened in connection with some real purpose or place, but which is unsupported by historical evidence. In many cases such narratives are quite incredible, but even so they may have a historically illustrative, a literary, or at least an amusing interest. Stories of a considerable number of well-known kinds of birds are in this way connected with actual persons, or with verifiable incidents of the past, and hence may be said to be “legends in an historical setting.” A fair example of them is the incident of the Capitoline geese.

Early in the third century before the Christian era a horde of Gaulish invaders under Brennus over-ran central Italy, and in 388 B.C. captured all of Rome itself except the lofty citadel called the Capitol, where a Roman general officer, Marcus Manlius, held out with a small garrison on the point of starvation. One night the besieging Gauls, having discovered an unguarded by-path, crept up the rocky steep, intending the surprise and capture of the almost worn-out defenders. “But,” says Plutarch,^[94] in Dryden’s translation, “there were sacred Geese kept near the Temple of Juno, which at other times were plentifully fed, but at this time, by reason of the Corn and all other Provisions were grown strait, their allowance was shorten’d and they themselves in a poor and lean condition. This Creature is by nature of quick sense, and apprehensive of the least noise; so that besides watchful through hunger, and restless, they immediately discovered the coming of the Gauls; so that running up and down, with their noise and cackling they raised the whole camp.”

Manlius sprang from sleep, aroused a body of soldiers and repelled the attack. It was the beginning of an ultimate victory over the enemy. Rome was saved, and in recognition of it Manlius was given the honorary title Capitolinus, and for a long time afterward the incident was celebrated annually by a procession to the Capitol in which a golden goose was carried. Livy also tells us in his history that the prototype of this golden symbol was a single sentinel goose never seen before, hence a divine aid sent to Rome for the purpose by the gods. It is interesting to note that

as Hudibras has it, were “sacred” to Juno, for this was before the time when she, having changed from the status of simple wife to Jupiter (and a model to human wives), had become the imperious and trouble-making empress of later days, and had discarded the motherly goose for the exotic, proud, and royally splendid peacock. This is a capital example of the adaptive character of the assignment of birds to the various demigods of the Roman pantheon; and it suggests the query whether in some principal cases reverence for the bird itself did not precede the conception of the divinity it afterward typified.

Another tale of birds acting as sentinels explains how the wren came to be so mortally hated by the Irish, whose cruel “hunting of the wren” is described in another chapter. According to Lady Wilde,^[60] a student of Irish folklore, this hatred is owing to the fact that once when Irish troops were approaching to attack a part of Thomas Cromwell’s army (about 1650) “wrens came and perched on the Irish drums, and by their tapping and noise aroused the English soldiers, who fell on the Irish troops and killed all of them.” This is a variant of a legend far older than Cromwell’s campaigning; and it is not the true explanation of the antipathy the cruder Irish and Manxmen still feel toward this innocent little songster, while at the same time they have a peculiar tenderness for the robin.

A third parallel is found in the annoyance caused the Scottish Covenanters. Many a meeting of pious Presbyterians in some hidden, heathery glen of the misty hills was discovered and roughly dispersed “because of the hovering, bewailing plovers, fearful for their young, clamoring overhead.” The poet Leyden alludes to the long-remembered grudge against this suspicious bird when, speaking of the religious refugees on the moors, he writes:

Returning to ancient history, two bird-stories of Alexander the Great are delightful as illustrating how an independent and masterful intellect, even in that early day above the Pagan superstitions of the time, might with ingenuity and boldness bend the sanctions of religion to his own ends without destroying them. The first one is an incident recorded of Alexander’s campaign in Asia Minor in 334 B.C. His fleet was anchored in the harbor of Miletus, and opposite it lay the fleet of the Persians. Alexander had no desire to disturb this situation, for he meant his army, not the navy, to do the work in view. One day an eagle, Jove’s bird, was seen sitting on the shore behind the Macedonian ships, and Parmenion, chief of staff, found in this fact convincing indication by the gods that victory was with the ships. Alexander pointed out that the eagle had perched on the land, not on the ships, giving thereby the evident intimation that it was only through the victory of the troops on land that the fleet could have value. As Alexander was commander-in-chief, this was evidently the orthodox interpretation.

Two years later Alexander was one day laying out on its site the plan of his foreordained city of Alexandria, in Egypt, and was marking the course of the proposed streets by sprinkling lines of flour in the lack of chalk-dust. “While the king,” says Plutarch, “was congratulating himself on his plan, on a sudden a countless number of birds of various sorts flew over from the land and the lake in clouds, and settling on the spot in clouds devoured in a short time all the flour, so that Alexander was much disturbed in mind at the omen involved, till the augurs restored his confidence, telling him the city ... was destined to be rich in its resources, and a feeder of nations of men.”

The straight face with which Plutarch^[94] recites these and similar stories of hocus-pocus in the matter of inconvenient omens is delightful; but the faith of the common people was not so easily shaken. For example: When the Sicilian-Greek army of Agathocles, Tyrant of Syracuse in the third century, B. C., was facing near Times a more powerful Carthaginian force, Agathocles let loose a number of owls among his men, “who suddenly took great courage as the birds sacred to Pallas settled blinking upon their helmets and shields”—and they routed the bigger enemy. That was true religious inspiration—as true as ever blazed in the heart of Christian crusader; but it was a sacrilegious trick on the part of Agathocles!

Just across the strait from Sicily, at Regium (Reggio), was the home of the celebrated cranes of Ibycus. Ibycus, a local poet, was being murdered by robbers when he called on the cranes fluttering near by to give witness of his death. Later, the murderers were one day at the theatre, when they saw a flock of cranes, and in fright whispered to one another: “The cranes of Ibycus!” They were overheard, arrested and executed, whence the proverb “the cranes of Ibycus” to express crime coming unexpectedly to light.

The Wonderful Magazine, an amazing periodical issued in London from 1793 to 1798, contained a story that in 1422 a “Roman” emperor besieging Zeta took all the sparrows his men could catch, and, tying lighted matches to their feet, let them go toward the town. But the citizens made a great noise, and the frightened sparrows flying back set the Roman camp on fire and so raised the siege. The reader may put his own estimate on this bit of historical lore; and may discover, if he can, where and what was Zeta.

Arabs in Palestine tell how a bird was involved in David’s sin of coveting Uriah’s wife. David, they say, had shut himself up in a tower for meditation, when, happening to look up, he saw just outside the window a bird of amazing beauty—a pigeon whose plumage gleamed like gold and jewels. David threw some crumbs on the floor, whereupon the pigeon came in and picked them up, but eluded David’s attempt to capture it. At last, to escape his efforts, it flew to the window and settled on one of the bars. He pursued, but it departed. It was then, as David followed the bright creature with longing eyes, that he caught sight of Madame Uriah in the bath—and was done for!

Among other excellent things in Hanauer’s Tales from Palestine^[43] is the following report of Solomon’s contest with a dove:

“In the southern wall of the Kubbet ’es-Sakhra [at Jerusalem], the mosque that now stands near the site of the ancient Temple, on the right side of the door as one enters there is a gray slab framed in marble of a dark color. It contains a figure, formed by natural veins in the stone, which is distinct enough to be taken for a picture of two doves perched facing each other on the edge of a vase. With this picture is connected a tale....

“The great king Solomon understood the language of beasts, birds and fishes, and, when he had occasion to do so, would converse with all of them. One day, soon after he had completed the Temple, as he was standing at a window of the royal palace, he overheard a conversation between a pair of birds that were sitting on the housetop. Presently the male, who was evidently trying to impress the female with his importance, exclaimed: ‘Solomon is a conceited fool! Why should he be so vain of this pile of buildings he has raised? I, if I wished, could kick them all over in a few minutes.’

“The king, greatly enraged by this pompous speech, summoned the offender into his presence and demanded what he meant by such an outrageous boast. ‘Your majesty,’ replied the bird, ‘will, I am sure, forgive my audacity, when I explain that I was in the company of a female; since your majesty doubtless knows from experience that in such circumstances the temptation to boast is almost irresistible.’ The monarch, forgetting his anger in his amusement, said with a smile: ‘Go your way this time, but see that you do not repeat the offence,’ and the bird, after a profound obeisance, flew away to rejoin his mate.

“He had hardly alighted before the female, unable to repress her curiosity, eagerly inquired why he had been summoned to the palace. ‘Oh,’ said the impudent boaster, ‘the king heard me tell you that if I chose I could kick down all his buildings in no time, and he sent for me to beg me not to do it.’

“Solomon, who, of course, heard this remark also, was so indignant at the incorrigible vanity of its author that he at once turned both birds into stone. They remain to this day as a reminder of the saying: ‘The peace of mankind consists in guarding the tongue.’”

But the stories of Solomon and his bird-friends are many. He was evidently a jolly old soul, and tradition says that when he travelled across the desert clouds of birds formed a canopy to protect him from the sun. The hoopoe, a high-crested bird that figures largely in other fanciful tales of the East, tells wise Solomonic stories, and is still regarded by Saharan nomads as possessed of peculiar virtues. The great Jewish king, whose reality is almost hidden under the legendary mantle, is said to have chosen the hoopoe, the cock and the pewit: the first because of its wit, the second in admiration of its cry, and the third because, says Hanauer, it can see through the earth, and could tell him where fountains of water could be found. The last preference is natural in an arid region, the pewit being a water-bird, the familiar lapwing-plover; and as it annually migrates through Palestine into Ethiopia it is reasonable that it should be fabled to be the means of bringing Solomon and the Queen of Sheba together, as is described in Chapter XXVII of the Koran. It should be noted that all of these birds are crested.

The veneration given to doves by the Mohammedans at Mecca is accounted for elsewhere; but swallows are held in almost equal reverence by both officials and pilgrims at that great shrine of Islam, and build their nests in the haram. This respect is explained by Keane^[14] as the result of a belief that they were the instruments by which Mecca was saved from the Abyssinian (Christian) army that is known to have invaded Arabia in the year of Mohammed’s birth, and to have been disastrously expelled. The tradition is that God sent flocks of swallows, every bird carrying three small stones in its beak and two in its claws, which were dropped on the heads of the Abyssinians, and miraculously penetrated the bodies of men and elephants until only one of the invaders was left alive. He fled back to his country, and had just finished telling of the disaster to the king when one of the swallows, which had followed him from Mecca, dropped its pebble and killed him too. The kernel of this dramatic story is in the nineteenth section of the Koran:^[59] “And he sent against them birds in flocks (ababils), claystones did he hurl down at them.” The historical explanation is that the Abyssinian invaders were destroyed by small-pox, the pustules of which are called in Arabic by a word meaning “small stones.”

Of a piece with these traditions and the Rabbinical tales of the Jews are the monkish legends preserved in early British chronicles, such as that by the Venerable Bede or by William of Malmesbury. The orthodox as well as dissenters had trouble with birds. Among the traditions of the celebrated Scotch-Irish missionary Columba (Latinized from his baptismal name Colum, “dove”) is one that once in his ardent youth Colum was trying to make by stealth in a church a copy of the psalter in possession of the selfish king, Finian of Donegal, who had refused the young enthusiast that privilege. A meddlesome stork, confined within the church, informed the sacristan, and Colum was arrested. Nevertheless by divine aid he got his copy, helpful to him afterward in his beneficent work in the Scottish highlands.

One of the prettiest of these old stories is that of St. Kenneth and the gulls.^[22] One day about A. D. 550 the blackheaded gulls, flying as usual along the coast of Wales, and scanning the sea sharply for food or anything else interesting to a gull, found floating in a coracle—a round, wickerwork canoe—a human baby a day or two old, contentedly asleep on a pallet made of a folded purple cloth. Several gulls seized the corners of this cloth and so carried the child to the ledge of the Welsh cliff where they nested, plucked feathers from their breasts to make a soft bed, laid the baby on it, then hastened to fly inland and bring a doe to provide it with milk, for which an angel offered a brazen bell as a cup. There the blessed waif lived for several months; but one day, in the absence of all the gulls, a shepherd discovered the infant and took him down to his hut and his kind wife. The gulls, returning from the sea, heard of this act from the doe. They at once rushed to the shepherd’s cottage, again lifted the babe by the corners of its purple blanket, and bore him back to the ledge of their sea-fronting crag. There he stayed until he had grown to manhood—a man full of laughter and singing and kind words; and the Welsh peasants of the Gower Peninsula revered him and called him Saint Kenneth.

Somewhat similar is the legendary history of Coemagen, or Saint Kelvin, an Irish monk of the eighth century, into whose charge was committed the infant son of Colman, a Leinster noble. “Coemagen fed the child on the milk of a doe which came from the forest to the door of his cell. A raven was wont, after the doe had been milked, to perch on the bowl, and sometimes would upset it. ‘Bad luck to thee!’ exclaimed the saint. ‘When I am dead there will be a famous wake, but no scraps for thee and thy clan!’ When very old St. Kelvin moved into a forest hermitage, where the birds came to him as companions. Once, while praying, his supplicating palms outstretched, a blackbird (thrush) dropped her eggs into the hollow of his hands, and he held his arms rigid until the chicks hatched.”

A curious parallel to the last incident is quoted by the Baroness Martinengo-Caesaresco^[20] “from an industrious translator” of the book Tatchi-Lou-Lun, describing how when a bird laid her eggs on the head of the first Buddha, which she mistook for the branch of a tree, he plunged himself into a trance so as not to move until the eggs had hatched and the young were flown.

St. Bede the younger, a contemporary of Coemagen, had a dove that used to come at his call; and an Irish monk, Comgall, would bid the swans near his residence come and cluster devotionally around his feet. Many saints, the legends declare, had authority over birds, and one, St. Millburg, abbess of Wenlock, in Shropshire, kept them out of the farmers’ crops by telling them it was naughty to despoil the grain. Of old, according to Canon Kingsley, St. Guthlac in Crowland said, as the swallows sat upon his knee, “He who leads his life according to the will of God, to him will the wild deer and the wild birds draw more near.”

The religious “hermits,” so prevalent at that period, were men who chose a more or less solitary life, quite as much, I suspect, on account of their love of nature as from purely devotional motives, and this was particularly true of those in Great Britain, exhibiting the characteristic British fondness for animal life. There was an early St. Bartholomew, for example, who in the sixth century or thereabout dwelt in seclusion on one of the Farne Islands off the northeastern coast of England, and made friends of the gulls and cormorants of the place. One of these he had tamed to eat out of his hand, and once, when Bartholomew was away fishing, a hawk pursued this poor bird into the chapel and killed it. Brother Bartholomew came in and found the hawk there with bloody talons and a shame-faced appearance. He caught it, kept it two days without food to punish it, then let it go. At another time, as he sat by the shore, a cormorant approached and pulled at his skirt, then led him to where one of its young had fallen into a crevice of the rocks whence the good man rescued it.

One of these rocky islets in the North Sea became so famous during the next century that it has been known ever since as Holy Isle, and the ruins of its monastery and cathedral still remain and may be seen from the railway train as it passes along the brink of the lofty coast a little south of Berwick-on-Tweed. This was the seat of the renowned Bishop Cuthbert of whom many quaint stories are told, apart from the record of his religious work. They attribute to his influence the extraordinary gentleness and familiarity characteristic of the eider duck, which is known to this day in Northumbria as Cuthbert’s bird. It was he, according to a narrative of a monk of the 13th century, who inspired these ducks with a hereditary trust in mankind by taking them as companions of his solitude when for several years he resided alone on Lindisfarne. There is good reason to accept this and similar traditions as largely true, for a like ability in “gentling” birds and other wild animals is manifested to-day by some persons of a calm and kindly sort.

Early in the eighth century a monk of intensely ascetic disposition, named Guthlac, retired to a solitary hermitage on an island in the dismal morasses of Lincolnshire, which afterward, if not then, was called Croyland or Crowland. He was sorely tempted by the Devil we are informed, and had many battles with “demons”—native British refugees hiding in the fens; but in the intervals of his fasting and fighting he got acquainted with the wild creatures about him. “The ravens, the beasts and the fishes,” says the record, “came to obey him. Once a venerable brother named Wilfred visited him, and ... suddenly two swallows came flying in ... and often they sat fearlessly on the shoulders of the holy man Guthlac, and then lifted up their song, and afterward they sat on his bosom and on his arms and his knees.... When Guthlac died angelic songs were heard in the sky, and all the air had a wondrous odor of exceeding sweetness.”

St. Kentigern, when a schoolboy, was wrongly accused of having twisted off the head of his master’s pet robin. He proved his innocence by putting the head and body together, whereupon the robin came to life and attended Kentigern until he became a great and good man. His master was St. Servan, and the robin was one that used to eat from his hand and perch on his shoulder, where it would twitter whenever Servan chanted the Psalms.

Here we encounter the mystical kind of story with which those old chroniclers like to embellish their biographies of holy men, and there was no limit to their credulity. Such is the tale of Carilef, a French would-be hermit of MÉnÀt, in Auvergne, who thought he was guided to set up a religious station because a wren had laid an egg in a hood that he had left hanging on a bush—a very wrenlike proceeding; and that was the foundation of the monastery about which the city of St. Calais grew in later times. Several other incidents of this kind are on record, showing that the value placed on any action by a bird that could be construed as a divine message. It is written that Editha, one of the early queens of England, persuaded her husband to found a religious house near Oxford on account of the omens she interpreted from the voice and actions of a certain magpie. Similarly the site for the abbey of Thierry, near Rheims, in France, was indicated to St. Theodoric, in the sixth century, by a white eagle circling around the top of the hill on which it subsequently was erected; and this miraculous eagle was seen year after year in the sky above it.

About that time Kenelm, son and heir of Kenulph, king of Wessex, was seven years old. His sister, who wanted to succeed to the throne in his place, procured his murder. The instant this was accomplished the fact was notified to the Pope, according to the Chronicles of Roger de Wendover, by a white dove that alighted on the altar of St. Peter’s, bearing in its beak a scroll on which was written

The Pope sent word to England, the body was found in a thicket over which hung a pillar of supernal light, and was taken to Winchelcumb, in Gloucestershire, for burial; and at the spot near Halesowen, in Shropshire, where he was killed, Kenelm’s Chapel was erected.

But the most mystical legend in which birds are a part, is one familiar in Brittany. It is related of St. Leonore, a Welsh missionary who went to Brittany in the sixth century, to whom many fabulous powers and deeds are attributed, the most comprehensible of which Baring-Gould has put into verse. Leonore, with a band of followers, had decided to settle in Brittany on a desolate moor; but they had forgotten to bring any seed-wheat, and were alarmed.

Greater poets than Baring-Gould or even Bishop Trench have found literary material in these monastic tales. Witness Longfellow’s Golden Legend, where he sings of good St. Felix, the Burgundian missionary who crossed the Channel, and in A.D. 604 converted to Christianity the wild king of the East Saxons; and who listened to the singing of a milk-white bird for a hundred years, although it had seemed to him but an hour, so enchanted was he with the music. No doubt myth-mongers might discourse very scientifically on this and some other of these episodes in the penumbra of history, but we will leave the pleasure of it to them.

None of these traditions of early bird-lovers and teachers of kindness are so pleasant as are those inspired by the gracious life of St. Francis.^[22] A familiar classic is his sermon to the birds when

One of the prettiest Franciscan stories is that of the saint and the nightingale as presented by Mrs. Jamieson;^[105] and, by the way, antiphonal singing with birds is related of several holy men and women of old:

As he was sitting with his disciple Leo, he felt himself penetrated with joy and consolation by the song of the nightingale ... and Francis began to sing, and when he stopped the nightingale took up the strain; and thus they sang alternately until the night was far advanced and Francis was obliged to stop for his voice failed. Then he confessed that the little bird had vanquished him. He called it to him, thanked it for its song, and gave it the remainder of his bread; and having bestowed his blessing upon it the creature flew away.

Longfellow has preserved in melodious verse that legend of the Spanish Charles V and the swallow that chose his tent as a site for its nest at a time when the emperor—

The headquarters staff were scandalized by the bird’s impudence, but Charles forbade their malice: