WHISTLING. 2 S s 



Dr. Franklin of his nephew, who set his mind on a common whistle, 

 which he bought of a boy for four times its value. Franklin says the 

 " ambitious who dance attendant on court, the miser who gives this 

 world and the next for gold, the libertine who ruins his health for 

 pleasure, the girl who marries a brute for money, all in the long run 

 pay too much for their whistle." Once more, the old hackneyed prov- 

 erbs " To wet one's whistle " and " To whistle for more " allude to the 

 whistle drinking-cups of days gone by. It appears that, in the six- 

 teenth and seventeenth centuries, silversmiths devoted a large amount 

 of invention to the production of drinking-tankards, which took the 

 form of men, animals, birds, etc., of most grotesque design.* Accord- 

 ing to one popular device, the cup had to be held in the hand to be 

 filled, and retained there till it was emptied, as then only it could be 

 set on the table. The drinker having swallowed the contents, blew up 

 the pipe at the side, which gave a shrill whistle, and announced to the 

 drawer that more liquor was required. Hence, too, no doubt, origi- 

 nated the phrase " whistle-drunk." Fielding relates how Squire West- 

 ern, when supping one night at a friend's house, " was indeed whistle- 

 drunk," for before he had swallowed the third bottle he became so 

 entirely overpowered that, though he was not carried off to bed till 

 long after, the parson considered him as absent. 



The idea of ghosts whistling is still far from extinct in England, 

 and enters largely into the folk-lore of our peasantry ; a superstition 

 which has been associated with the " Seven Whistlers," supposed by 

 some to be phantom-birds. Thus, among the colliers of Leicestershire, 

 we are told how, when trade is brisk and money plentiful, disposing 

 them for a drinking-frolic, they are said to hear the warning voice of 

 the " Seven Whistlers " birds sent purposely, as they affirm, by Provi- 

 dence to warn them of an impending danger, and on hearing the sig- 

 nal not a man will descend into the pit until the following day.f 

 Wordsworth, it may be remembered, in one of his sonnets, couples the 

 " Seven Whistlers " with the " Gabriel hounds," those weird, mysterious 

 specter-dogs which with such fiendish yellings haunt the midnight air : 



" The poor old man is greater than he seems : 

 He the seven birds hath seen that never part, 

 Seen the seven whistlers in their nightly rounds, 

 And counted them ; and oftentimes will start, 

 For overhead are sweeping Gabriel's hounds." 



The superstitious fear attaching to these whistlers is noticed by Spenser 

 in his " Faerie Queen " (book ii, canto xii, stanza 36), where, " among 

 the nation of unfortunate and fatal birds " that flocked about Sir Guyon 

 and the Palmer, it is thus alluded to : 



"The whistler shrill, that whoso hears doth die." 



* Chambers's " Book of Days," ii, 455. 



f " Nature," June 22, 1871, 140 ; " Notes and Queries," fourth series, viii, 68. 



