256 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



It has been suggested that the whistler is the green plover to which Sir 

 Walter Scott refers in " The Lady of the Lake," where he relates how 



" In the plover's shrilly strains 

 The signal whistle's heard again " 



its ominous shrill whistle which startles, with dreadful awe, the mid- 

 night traveler as he journeys along some lonely road, sounding far 

 more like a human note than that of a bird. In illustration of this 

 view we may quote the following anecdote related by a correspondent 

 of " Notes and Queries " (fourth series, viii, 268), which, however, sup- 

 ports the popular theory of the birds in question being supernatural 

 beings : " One evening a few years ago, when crossing one of our Lan- 

 cashire moors in company with an intelligent old man, he was suddenly 

 startled by the whistling overhead of a covey of plovers. My com- 

 panion remarked that when a boy the old people considered such a cir- 

 cumstance a bad omen, ' as a person who heard the wandering Jews,' 

 as he called the plovers, * was sure to be overtaken by some ill-luck.' 

 On questioning my friend about the name given to the birds, he said, 

 ' There is a tradition that they contain the souls of those Jews who 

 assisted at the crucifixion, and in consequence were doomed to float in 

 the air forever.' When he arrived at the foot of the moor, a coach 

 by which I had hoped to reach my destination had already started, 

 thereby causing me to continue my journey on foot. The old man 

 reminded me of the omen." To quote a further anecdote recorded by 

 another correspondent of the same journal, we are told how during a 

 thunder-storm which passed over the neighborhood of Kettering on 

 the evening of September 6, 1871 on which occasion the lightning 

 was very vivid an unusual spectacle was witnessed : immense flocks 

 of birds were flying about, uttering doleful, affrighted cries as they 

 passed over the locality, and for hours they kept up a continual whis- 

 tling like that made by sea-birds. " The following day," adds the 

 writer, " as my servant was driving me to a neighboring village, this 

 phenomenon of the flight of birds became the subject of conversation, 

 and, on asking him what birds he thought they were, he told me they 

 were what were called the ' Seven Whistlers,' and that whenever they 

 were heard it was considered a sign of some great calamity, and that 

 the last time he heard them was before the great Hartley Colliery ex- 

 plosion ; he had also been told by soldiers that if they heard them 

 they always expected a great slaughter would take place soon. Cu- 

 riously enough, on taking up the newspaper on the following morn- 

 ing, I saw headed in large letters, 'Terrible Colliery Explosion at 

 Wigan,' etc. This, I thought, would confirm my man's belief in the 

 " Seven Whistlers." Among the pieces of folk-lore connected with 

 whistling may be mentioned that of sailors whistling for a wind on a 

 calm day ; an expedient which they believe seldom fails. Thus Long- 

 fellow, in his " Golden Legend," speaks of this notion : 



