84 
OUR HOME BIRDS. 
whole powers of song to excel the other. When the 
young are hatched the hurry and press of business 
leave no time for disputing ; so true it is that idleness 
is the mother of mischief/ 
“ The way in which the wren’s tail sticks up from 
its short, plump body gives it a particularly saucy 
expression, having very much the effect of a turned- 
up nose ; and it seems always ready to do something 
that it has no right to do. It seems equally at home 
on either side of the ocean, and in England it is as 
popular as the redbreast. In the West of England 
one often hears the rhymes — 
1 Whoso kills a robin or a wren 
Shall never prosper, boy nor man/ 
In the South of Ireland, however, the poor little wren 
has an unhappy time of it. They have a legend 
there that a party of Irish soldiers during some war 
were on the point of surprising their enemies, who 
lay tired out and fast asleep, when a wren perched 
on the enemy’s drum and woke the sentinels. For 
this unconscious misdemeanor on the part of their 
remote ancestor the wrens of the present day suffer 
at the hands of the peasantry for several weeks be- 
fore Christmas. Every wren that is seen is hunted 
to death, and the bodies are carefully preserved until 
St. Stephen’s Day, when they are suspended from a 
