Some Beasts of Reproach. 109 



the poets wished to find hard things to say of the crea- 

 ture, why did they not say that its caves stink like a wilder- 

 ness of polecats, or .that its fur is incredibly swarming with 

 vermin ? 



To those who have seen the " flying foxes " of tropical 

 countries — stretching nearly five feet across the wings — 

 flapping their solemn way across the evening sky, or have 

 seen them with softly fanning wings wheeling round the wild 

 fruit trees; the " vampyre " and generally weird idea of the 

 bat is easily explicable. But that the busy, merry, little 

 harlequin of our English twilight should have earned for 

 itself the ill name it possesses, shows a fertility of supersti- 

 tion which is very interesting. 



" Bloody, bloody bat, 

 Come into my hat ! " 



cries the country urchin, holding his cap over the bridge as 

 the tiny flickering things tumble about in the air in pursuit 

 of moths and beetles. He expects this prodigious spell to 

 fascinate "the night-flier" into the cap which he holds out 

 for its reception. Nor are his elders more Vnsible. In 

 Scotland they call them "bawkie birds," thinp lof ill-'- ~~" 

 and over a large part of rural England they ar. '■"^ ^^'^ ^^^ 

 be blood-suckers, and in league with the p' "^n^ely? its 

 "the other world." But public opinion hasf^^''^ ^'^"'^^ ^^ 

 them from the first. \ ^^ the hour 



At the Creation, so they say, the bat affect ">'^^'^^^ "n- 

 ostrich) to be neither beast nor bird, in the \ 

 ing the task which Allah was apportioning i ^^^' ^"d for 

 punished in the end by being told that all th ^ox-hunting 

 the night were already distributed, and that i °^ course, 

 shift for itself as it could with those hours which 

 the one nor the other. The Mosaic law pronoi 

 — " the fowl that creeps, going on all fours " — 

 tion, and the Rabbis carried on the national pre 



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