252 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



makes a whistling sound, he scares from him the Holy Ghost" ; while 

 other Icelanders, who consider themselves free from superstitions, 

 cautiously give the advice : " Do it not ; for who knoweth what is in 

 the air?" However eccentric these phases of superstitious belief may 

 appear to us, yet it must not be forgotten that very similar notions pre- 

 vail at the present day, in this country. A correspondent of " Notes 

 and Queries" (1879, fifth series, xii, 92), for instance, relates how one 

 day, after attempting in vain to get his dog to obey orders to come 

 into the bouse, his wife tried to coax it by whistling, when she was 

 suddenly interrupted by a servant, a Roman Catholic, who exclaimed 

 in the most piteous accents, "If you please, ma'am, don't whistle 

 every time a woman whistles, the heart of the blessed Virgin bleeds ! " 

 In some districts of North Germany the villagers say that if one 

 whistles in the evening it makes the angels weep. Speaking, how- 

 ever, of ladies in connection with whistling, it is a wide-spread su- 

 perstition that it is at all times unlucky for them to whistle, which, 

 according to one legend, originated in the circumstance that, while the 

 nails for our Lord's cross were being forged, a woman stood by and 

 whistled. Curiously enough, however, one very seldom hears any of 

 the fair sex indulging in this recreation, although there is no reason, 

 as it has been often pointed out, why they should not whistle with as 

 m.uch facility as the opposite sex. One cause, perhaj)s, of the absence 

 of this custom among women may be, in a measure, due to the distor- 

 tion of the features which it occasions. Thus we know how Minerva 

 cast away, with an imprecation, the pipe, which afterward proved so 

 fatal to Marsyas, when she beheld in the water the disfigurement of 

 her face caused by her musical performance. There are numerous in- 

 stances on record, nevertheless, of ladies whistling at public entertain- 

 ments, and charming their audiences with the graceful ease with which 

 they performed such airs as "The Blue Bells of Scotland" or "The 

 Mocking-Bird." Indeed, not many years ago, at a grand provincial 

 concert, two sisters excited much admiration by the clever and artistic 

 way in which they whistled a duet. 



Referring to whistling performances, Addison, in one of the earlier 

 numbers of the " Spectator," gives an amusing account of a contest, 

 where a prize of a guinea was to be conferred on the successful com- 

 petitor who could not only whistle the best, but go through his tune 

 without laughing, and that in spite of the ludicrous antics of a certain 

 merry-andrew, whose special duty it was to try as far as possible to 

 discompose each of the competitors by making grimaces. On the oc- 

 casion in question, the competitors were an under-citizen, remarkable 

 for his wisdom a plowman endued " with a very promising aspect of 

 inflexible stupidity " and a footman, who, having captivated his audi- 

 ence by whistling " a Scotch tune and an Italian sonata," carried off 

 the prize. Strutt, in his " Sports and Pastimes," relates the remark- 

 able performance of a whistler, who, assuming the name of Rossignol, 



