THS KINGFISHER'S HJU^JTS 17 



It is no marvel that a bird so beautiful should have 

 been, in all ages, theme for myth and folk-lore. Who 

 does not remember how Halcyone, the sea-god's daughter, 

 saw her husband's lifeless figure laid upon the shore, and 

 threw herself despairing in the waves ? And how the 

 gods, in pity, changed her mate and her to birds of rare 

 plume, whose dress of green and red and azure has out- 

 lasted even " the immortals " ? 



Hardly less strange is Pliny's stoiy, that, in the dead 

 of winter, the halcyon built her nest upon the sea, and 

 that by her father's gift the waves were quiet while she 

 brooded on her eggs. 



The kingfisher was clearly not common even in Pliny's 

 time. " This very bird so notable," he says, according 

 to that version by Holland, whose quaint diction is just 

 in keeping with the old-world story, " is little bigger 

 than a sparrow ; for the more part of her pennage blew, 

 intermingled yet among with white and purple feathers, 

 having a thin, small neck and long withal. It is a very 

 great chance to see one of these halcycons. They haunt 

 rivers, and sing among the flags and reeds." 



Giraldus, the learned Welshman who wrote the " Topo- 

 graphy of Ireland," records the legend current in his 

 time, that a dead kingfisher, if kept from damp, would 

 not decay, and if hung up by the beak would renew its 

 feathers year by year. 



Aldrovandus, however, who took for gospel all that 

 was told him in the course of his travels, has a story sur- 

 passing even this. He tells us that a kingfisher's skin 

 suspended in the air will point without fail to the quarter 



