AGE OF RAVEN 157 



u Thin is thy plumage, death is in thy croak ; 

 Raven, come down from that majestic oak," 



cries one, half in terror, half in make-believe 

 contempt, when he sees and hears the bird of 

 destiny athwart his path. But the raven, with 

 sublime Promethean scorn for the creature of the 

 day who dares so to accost him, thus replies : 



" When /was hatched my father set this tree. 

 An acorn then : its fall I hope to see 

 A century after thou hast ceased to be." 



There cannot be so much smoke without some fire 

 behind it ; and I am inclined to think that a raven 

 does live to a very great age for a bird ; and that 

 Horace's epithet for the raven, "annosus," and 

 Tennyson's " many-wintered crow" are justified by 

 facts. But the belief in its extreme age rests, I 

 suspect, on one of its most touching characteristics, 

 its intense hereditary attachment to the spot, a par- 

 ticular cliff, a particular grove, a particular tree, where 

 its ancestors, where itself, and where its young have 

 been born and bred. The most striking instance 

 that has come within my own knowledge was at the 

 home of my grandfather, the Down House, Bland- 

 ford. In a fine clump of beeches, in the middle 

 of a plantation named Littlewood, a raven used 



