132 THE RAVEN IN POETRY AND FOLK-LORE 



But it is the aged Adam, the ideal " faithful 

 servant " in As You Like It, who, cheerfully giving 

 up the five hundred crowns all his savings, that 

 is lest his young master should come to want, 

 best enters into the spirit of the Bible stories, 

 and may we not add into the essence of all true 

 religion? when, having divested himself of his 

 last farthing, he prays thus : 



" Take that, and He that doth the ravens feed, 

 Yea, providently caters for the sparrow, 

 Be comfort to my age ! " 



The raven, it is true, like some other birds which 

 abound in affection for their young, will, for some 

 inscrutable reason, sometimes regard the young 

 bird which has fallen out of her nest, as out of her 

 care. A hedge-sparrow, for instance, will leave her 

 young ones which have been thrown out of her nest, 

 one after the other, by the intruding cuckoo to die 

 untended, and lie, as I have seen them myself, in a 

 ghastly row beneath it, while she devotes the whole 

 of her attention to the " overgrown step-child " which 

 monopolises and fills it. 



That the raven, however, does tend her young 

 with the tenderest maternal care, while they are in 

 the nest, and flies about with them, for weeks or 

 months, after they are able to leave it, supplying all 



