320 
THE STORK. 
who met with them in incredible numbers in Asia Minor, 
observed that although they built on the mosques, minarets, 
and Turkish houses, their nests were never erected on a 
Christian roof. In the Turkish quarters they were met in 
all directions, strutting about most familiarly, mixing with 
the people in the streets, hut rarely entering the parts of the 
town inhabited by the Greeks or Armenians, by whom possi- 
bly they may he occasionally disturbed. Nothing can he 
more interesting than the view of an assemblage of their 
nests. Divided as they always are, into pairs, sometimes 
only the long elastic neck of one of them is to he seen peering 
from its cradle of nestlings, the mate standing by on one of 
his long slim legs, and watching with every sign of the closest 
affection. While other couples on the adjacent walls are 
fondly entwining their pliant necks, and mixing their long 
hills, the one sometimes bending her neck over her hack, and 
burying her hill in the soft plumage, while her companion, 
clacking his long beak with a peculiar sharp and monotonous 
sound, raises her head and embraces it with a quivering delight; 
while from the holes and crannies of the walls, below the 
Stork’s nest, thousands of little blue Turtle Doves flit in all 
directions, keeping up an incessant cooing by day and night. 
At another Mohammedan town, Fez, on the coast of Bar- 
bary, there is a rich hospital expressly built, and supported 
by large funds, for the sole purpose of assisting and nursing 
sick Cranes and Storks, and of burying them when dead ! 
This respect arises from a strange belief, handed down from 
time immemorial, that the Storks are human beings in that 
form, men from some distant islands, who, at certain seasons 
of the year, assume the shape of these birds, that they may visit 
Barhary, and return at a fixed time to their own country, 
where they resume the human form. It has been conjectured 
that this tradition came originally from Egypt, where the 
Storks are held in equal respect, as we shall see, when we 
speak of their sacred bird, the Ibis. By the Jews, the former 
was also respected though for a different reason ; they called 
it Chaseda, — which in Hebrew signifies piety, or mercy, — 
from the tenderness shown by the young to the older birds, 
