GERMANY, ITALY, AND FRANCE 313 



advent of a guest. " When the pie chatters," says 

 an old proverb, "we shall have guests." In Italy, 

 she is proverbial for her tittle-tattle. Hence her 

 name gazza y or chatterer, from which again comes 

 the word gazzetta, or " gazette," for a newspaper 

 which, like the bird, reveals secrets. In a large 

 part of France, where people go out, in sporting 

 dress, to kill the thrush, the robin, and the skylark, 

 and welcome the swallows, upon their return, in 

 springtime, to their shores, by wholesale massacre 

 on electric wires set up for the purpose, the magpie 

 is almost the only bird, large or small, which does 

 not seem to wear a hunted look. Her nest, which 

 manages to cling somehow to the lopped and 

 scarecrow poplars, which the inhabitants fancy to 

 be trees, is, in the eyes of the lover of birds, one of 

 the few alleviations of a railway journey through 

 large tracts of a country, which, if God made it 

 beautiful, la belle France, man has done his best to 

 make unattractive or even hideous, by depriving it 

 of its hedges, its bushes, its woods, and its birds. 

 In Poitou, it is said that a trace of "pye- worship" 

 still survives. A bunch of laurel and heather is 

 hung on the top of a high tree " in honour of 

 the pye," because there, too, her chatter used to 

 warn the people of the wolfs approach. " Portez" 



