“ All in ye Merrie Month of May ” 
Box, and Lavender. The birds are quite indefatigable in 
singing, they never seem to leave off. I wish I knew their 
many notes better apart. There is one bird which seems 
to say, “Give it her, give it her.” What? The freedom 
of the greenwood ? 
The Blackbirds are very noisy, and are such bold birds, 
and here are particularly well fed and portly, like bird 
aldermen. There is a Blackbird’s nest in an old Cherry-laurel 
on the Primrose-bank ; a scolding mama flutters out when- 
ever we pass. Gardener calls the Merle the “ terrible 
blackbird,” because he is so destructive, a sort of avian 
Nero or Ivan the Terrible among crops. The Blackbird 
is celebrated as the Merle in old Scottish songs and ballads. 
He is also called the Ousel or Oszil. This comes from the 
Saxon word for the bird, which is osle. There is an old 
expression in Orkney “to ouze,” meaning to “pour forth,” 
so, perhaps, he gained this name from the flood of melody 
he pours out. An old local term for “swarthy like a black- 
bird” here was “ ozelly.” This may be the reason why, in the 
old Jacobite song, Prince Charlie is called “The Blackbird,” 
from his dark complexion. The song is called “ The 
Blackbird,” and the refrain is : 
Good luck to my Blackbird, wherever he be ! 
The following is a curious coincidence of terms, to say the 
least. The English spelling of Oszil was generally Ousel, 
and Jamieson declares that in Peebles the “Sacrament of 
the Lord’s Supper ” was called Ousel ; the old English 
word was Housel, and the Anglo-Saxon term for the Mass, 
Husl , the same as the Icelandic, while to die “ unhouselled ” 
was to die without the Sacrament. In Roxburgh, an old 
name for the Sacrament was “ Hoozle,” which was also 
used there to mean a band tying loose papers together ; it 
was also used for the handle of an axe, _or rather the part 
into which the axe was fixed. “To hoozle ” in Ayrshire meant 
“to puzzle, to make things dark or perplex.” This confusion 
of terms and meaning is curious. Can it be possible that 
it arose out of the impulse there was, after the Scottish 
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