Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/146

 124 His crown, thus dyeing its own breast red; in Wales for daily bearing in its bill one drop of water to the place of torment, in order to extinguish its flames.

The Breton legend has been thus versified by the Rev. J. H. Abrahall:

Boys always respect its nest: they say in Cornwall,

But the penalty attached to such sacrilege in Devonshire is peculiar. A little boy in the neighbourhood of Dartmoor was heard to say that if you took a robin’s nest all the “clomb” (i. e. crockery) in the house would break.

In Scotland, however, the song of the robin is thought to bode ill to the sick person who hears it, and a similar belief holds in Northamptonshire; where, indeed, the bird is counted a certain prophet of death, and is said to tap three times at the window of a dying person’s room. Thus, again, at St. John’s College, Hurstpierpoint, the boys maintain that when a death takes place a robin will enter the chapel, light upon the altar, and begin to sing.

The wren generally shares in the reverence paid to the robin;