FABLE AND FOLKLORE 187 



came and sate upon those little trees or shrubs which he 

 had chose for his court, which when they had perceived 

 they sought no further in that place, supposing that the 

 said bird would not have sat there if any man had been 

 hidden underneath. ,, 



A very similar legend in China accounts for the use of 

 peacock plumes as insignia of rank and is related as fol- 

 lows by Katherine M. Ball 68 : In the Chin dynasty a de- 

 feated general took refuge in a forest where there were 

 many peacocks. When the pursuing forces arrived, and 

 found the fowl so quiet and undisturbed, they concluded 

 that no one could possibly have come that way, and forth- 

 with abandoned the search. The general — who later be- 

 came the ancestor of five kings — was thus able to escape, 

 and so grateful was he that later, when he came into 

 power, he instituted the custom of conferring a peacock 

 feather as an honor for the achievement of bravery in 

 battle. 



Japan has a similar mythical legend. 



Frenchmen call the common brown owl of Europe 

 chouette; and when in 1793 disgruntled smugglers and 

 Royalist soldiers were carrying on guerrilla warfare in 

 Brittany and Poitu against the new order of things, they 

 came to be called Chouans, "owls," from the signal-cries 

 they made to one another in their nocturnal forays as 

 appears so often in Balzac's novel The Chouans. 



Not much of this spookish and legendary lore seems 

 to have been imported into the United States, or else it 

 has disappeared, except that which still lingers among 

 the superstitious negroes of the South. A writer in one 

 of the early issues of The Cosmopolitan (magazine) re- 

 lated that to the black folks of the Cotton Belt forty years 

 or so ago the quavering "song" of our small mottled 



