FABLE AND FOLKLORE 263 



when a bird laid her eggs on the head of the first 

 Buddha, which she mistook for the branch of a tree, 

 he plunged himself into a trance so as not to move 

 until the eggs had hatched and the young were flown. 

 St. Bede the younger, a contemporary of Coemagen, 

 had a dove that used to come at his call; and an Irish 

 monk, Comgall, would bid the swans near his residence 

 come and cluster devotionally around his feet. Many 

 saints, the legends declare, had authority over birds, 

 and one, St. Millburg, abbess of Wenlock, in Shrop- 

 shire, kept them out of the farmers' crops by telling 

 them it was naughty to despoil the grain. Of old, ac- 

 cording to Canon Kingsley, St. Guthlac in Crowland 

 said, as the swallows sat upon his knee, "He who leads 

 his life according to the will of God, to him will the 

 wild deer and the wild birds draw more near." 



The religious "hermits," so prevalent at that period, 

 were men who chose a more or less solitary life, quite 

 as much, I suspect, on account of their love of nature 

 as from purely devotional motives, and this was par- 

 ticularly true of those in Great Britain, exhibiting the 

 characteristic British fondness for animal life. There 

 was an early St. Bartholomew, for example, who in the 

 sixth century or thereabout dwelt in seclusion on one 

 of the Fame Islands off the northeastern coast of Eng- 

 land, and made friends of the gulls and cormorants of 

 the place. One of these he had tamed to eat out of his 

 hand, and once, when Bartholomew was away fishing, 

 a hawk pursued this poor bird into the chapel and killed 

 it. Brother Bartholomew came in and found the hawk 

 there with bloody talons and a shame-faced appearance. 

 He caught it, kept it two days without food to punish 

 it, then let it go. At another time, as he sat by the 



