Page:Curious myths of the Middle Ages (1876).djvu/411

 the raven’s nest, then replace it, and secrete oneself till the mother-bird, finding one of her eggs resist all her endeavours to infuse warmth into it, flies off and brings a black pebble in her beak, with which she touches the boiled egg, and restores it to its former condition. At this moment she must be shot, and the stone be secured.

In this form of the superstition schamir has the power of giving life. This probably connects it with those stories, so rife in the middle ages, of birds or weasels, which were able to restore the dead to life by means of a mysterious plant. Avicenna relates in his eighth book, “Of Animals,” that it was related to him by a faithful old man, that he had seen two little birds squabbling, and that one was overcome; it therefore retired and ate of a certain herb, then it returned to the onslaught; which when the old man observed frequently, he took away the herb, and when the bird came and found the plant gone, it set up a great cry and died. And this plant was lactua agrestis.

In Fouqué’s “Sir Elidoc,” a little boy Amyot is watching by a dead lady laid out in the church, when “suddenly I heard a loud cry from the child. I looked up, a little creature glided by me; the shepherd’s staff of the boy flew after it; the creature