FABLE AND FOLKLORE 25 



the mystery and fiction of their being animated by spirits. 

 When they were black, like ravens and cormorants, or 

 were cruel night-prowlers, such as owls, or uttered dis- 

 consolate cries, they were thought to be inhabited by 

 dread, malignant, spirits "from night's Plutonian shore," 

 as Poe expresses it, but when they had pretty plumage, 

 pleasing ways and melodious voices, they were deemed 

 the embodiment of beneficent and happy spirits — per- 

 haps even those of departed relatives. 



Hence we have the notion that some birds are lucky 

 and others unlucky in their relation to us. Those that 

 bring good luck are mainly those kinds that associate 

 themselves with civilization, such as the various robins, 

 wrens and storks, the doves and the swallows. Even so, 

 however, time and place must be considered in every case, 

 for the dearest of little birds when it pecks at a window- 

 pane, or seems bent on entering a cottage door will arouse 

 tremors of fear in a superstitious heart — much more so 

 a bird that ordinarily keeps aloof from mankind. Frazer 

 records, in his essay on Scapegoats, that if a wild bird flies 

 into a rural Malay's house, it must be carefully caught 

 and smeared with oil, and must then be released into the 

 open air with a formula of words adjuring it to take away 

 all ill-luck. In antiquity Greek women seem to have done 

 the same with any swallow they found inside the house, 

 a custom mentioned by both Pythagoras and Plato — the 

 latter humorously proposing to dismiss poets from his 

 ideal State in the same manner. Such doings remind 

 one of the function of the scapegoat ; and in fact, accord- 

 ing to Frazer, the Hazuls, of the Carpathian Mountains, 

 imagine they can transfer their freckles to the first 

 swallow they see in the spring by uttering a certain com- 

 mand to the bird. Are these practices distorted reminis- 



