Page:Shetland Folk-Lore - Spence - 1899.pdf/172

 connected with the cock. It was exceedingly lucky to possess a black cock. There was a belief that trows were quite powerless within sound of its crowing. “A black cock with a red breast had more virtue than a priest.”

Women at the time of child-bearing were especially liable to be taken by the hillfolk, and hence the midwife was generally an expert in the art of preserving her charge from the trows. When a birth was about to take place, it was customary to borrow a black cock to have in the house. The ordinary rooster did not trouble himself to crow save at midnight and in the morning, but the swart bird of which we speak detected the vaam of any unseen presence, and announced the same by crowing at any hour. When a cock was heard crowing at an unseasonable time, it was understood that some fey person (doomed to die) was within hearing; and if a person had met with any serious fright, the living heart was torn from the