Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/144

122 that the bells ring on Christmas Eve. This pretty legend may be compared with that of the bells of Bottreaux or Boscastle, on the north coast of Cornwall, which never reached that still “silent tower,” the vessel that was freighted with them foundering at sea. The bells are said to be rung in oceans’ caves by unseen hands, and the Cornish fisherman listens for their chimes on Sunday mornings.

Birds have always supplied numberless auguries. When rooks desert a rookery it foretells the downfall of the family on whose property it is. There is a Northumbrian saying, that the rooks deserted the rookery of Chipchase before the family of Reed left that place. On the other hand, the Wilkie MS. informs us, that, when rooks haunt a town or village, mortality is supposed to await its inhabitants, and if they feed in the street it shows a storm is near at hand.

The same authority tells us that it is a very good omen for swallows to take possession of a place, and build their nests around it; while it is unpropitious for them to forsake a place which they have once tenanted. Now the swallow, “God’s fowl,” the herald of spring, has been held a sacred bird by the whole Germanic race: it preserves the house on which it builds from fire and storms, and protects it from evil; while, in its turn, it is protected by the penalties which threaten the sacrilegious hand which should destroy it—the loss of dairy-produce, or continued rain for four weeks. In Yorkshire the punishment is not so defined, but it is considered certain to fall in one form or other. A farmer’s wife near Hull told a friend of mine, Mrs. L., how some young men, sons of a banker in that town, had pulled down all the swallows’ nests about a little farm which he possessed. “The bank broke soon after,” she went on, “and, poor things, the family have had nought but trouble since!” This belief crops out in Sussex too, where they say that misfortune is sure to follow the taking of a swallow’s nest, or killing a house cricket. In Perigord the swallow is the “messenger of life;” in some parts of France it shares with the wren the title of “poule de Dieu;” and among our own peasantry, those who say—