EMBERIZA CITRINELLA. 381 



with a stick, tried to smash them ; the game being won by 

 him who broke them. This old bit of senseless rhyme shows 

 the silly prejudice against this bonny bird — 



" Hauf a puddock, hauf a taed, 

 Hauf a yellow yeldrin, 

 You'll get a drap o' deeviVs bluid 

 Ilka May mornin'." 



It used to be called the "yellow yeldrin," and "devil's 

 bird," but why can only be answered from the limbo of 

 superstition, where sits and broods the dark enemy of Peace 

 and Truth. I remember even yet the eerie feelings I had 

 when, about eight years old, in 1831, I got the eggs out of my 

 first bird's nest — a yellow yowt's — at the side of the burn 

 near the old lawmill. A little schoolfellow took me to see a 

 " yellow yowt's nest at the side o' a burn," and gave me the eggs, 

 which I took with such a queer feeling of doing wrong that, on 

 being scolded by my mother for bringing them, I could not rest 

 until I wandered back and replaced them in that " nest at the 

 side o' a burn." But because it is seen on every roadside, like 

 the bonny dandelion flower, this handsome yellow bird is passed 

 by unnoticed. Like the rest of its genus it is deficient in song, 

 confined to the repetition of a single note, longer and higher at 

 the end. It is something like deil, dell, deil tak' thee-ee. 

 Unmusical and dolorous though it be, its very sadness, as one 

 saunters along the wayside, gives it an interest of its own, as it 

 sits on some old dyke or the topmost twig of a hedge, and 

 harmonises with the whistle of the blackbird in the brake, and 

 the more cheerful song of the lark in the sky. Its usual cry is 

 chit, chit, chirr. It breeds and sings later than most small birds 

 — a proof that it has more than one brood in the year, for 

 singing and breeding — like "freedom and whisky" as Burns 

 says — " gang thegither," although, I may add, drunkenness and 

 ruin sleep thegither. It makes its nest in low bushes, or under 

 a tuft of grass in a hollow scraped out for the purpose by the 

 side of a burn, bank, or ditch, and lays four or five eggs of a 

 pale purplish white, peculiarly marked with veins of chocolate- 

 red — unlike any other bird's except the cirl bunting's, but, 

 being larger cannot be mistaken for them. It also builds on 

 trees, and thus comes nearest the finches, while its longer hind 

 claws allies it to the larks. On May 13th, 1858, a gardener 

 showed me a nest in a kitchen green with three fresh eggs. On 

 cutting the green the day before with the scythe the bird flew 

 up ; on looking down he saw the nest with two eggs then. I 



