THE SWAN. 
185 
moderated in tlie breeze. The Icelanders, whose 
year may be said to consist but of one long day of 
Summer months, when they enjoy the light, of the 
sun, and one long night of Winter, when be never 
cheers them with his rays, compare this cry of the 
Wild Swan to the sound of a violin ; and when 
heard at the end of their long and dreary Winter, 
announcing the approach of genial weather, it is 
associated and coupled in their minds with all that 
is cheerful and delightful. Any person who has 
seen a common Swan lash the water with its wings, 
as it flaps along the surface, or has witnessed the 
force with which it strikes a boat, when the rowers 
approach the female with her young cygnets, needs 
not to be reminded of the strength of its enormous 
pinions, and their consequent effect upon the air, 
enabling the bird to fly, according to the report of those 
who have watched the immense flocks passing to and 
from the lakes and rivers of the British settlements 
in Canada, at a rate of not less than one hundred miles 
an hour; a prodigious velocity, when we consider the 
size and weight of these noble birds. It is a pre- 
vailing opinion, amounting almost to a proverb, that 
a stroke of a Swan s wing will break a mans leg. 
How far this may be strictly true, we cannot say ; 
but having once seen the pinion of an old Swan laid 
entirely bare to the very bone, and feathers and skin 
stripped off by an angry stroke on the gunwale of 
a boat, which it fiercely endeavoured to board, we 
think it not impossible. At all events, a blow of its 
wing can be inflicted to good and fatal effect, in case 
of necessity, as a crafty fox, wishing for a feast of 
Swan’s eggs, found to his cost. The female was sit- 
