FABLE AND FOLKLORE 93 



show the absurdity of this notion, yet it has held 

 on. Swann tells of an Englishman who declared that it 

 was well-known that sparrow-hawks changed into 

 cuckoos in spring; and another old belief is that the 

 European land-rail becomes in winter the water-rail, re- 

 suming its own form in spring. A French name for the 

 land-rail, by the way, is "king of the quails, ,, because the 

 quails chose it as leader in their migrations. 



One of the most picturesque incidents in the story of 

 the wilderness-roving of the Children of Israel, who were 

 "murmuring" for the fleshpots of Egypt, is the sudden 

 coming of quails that "filled the camp." The interpre- 

 tation is plain that a migratory host of these birds had 

 settled for the night where the Hebrews, or some of them, 

 were; and the notable point is their abundance, and that 

 they had disappeared when morning came, which is 

 characteristic. These quails visit Europe in summer in 

 prodigious numbers from south of the Mediterranean, 

 and are netted for market by tens of thousands. It is 

 said that in old times the bishops of Capri — Italy receives 

 the greatest flight — derived a large part of their wealth 

 from a tax on the catching of quails. Pliny alleges, as 

 an example of the immense migrations of these quails in 

 his time, that often, always at night, they settled on the 

 sails of ships and so sank them. This really seems 

 possible when one thinks of the small size of the "ships" 

 of that period, and recalls that flights of our own mi- 

 grating pigeons (now extinct) used to smash down stout 

 branches of trees by the weight of the crowds of birds 

 that settled on them. 



Cranes are birds of striking characteristics, as we have 

 seen, and seem to have impressed very forcibly the ancient 

 Greeks as well as recent Orientals, the latter finding in 



