68 
PICTURES OF BIRD LIFE. 
tone, therefore, his song would be as monotonous as that of the missel thrush, 
which in modulation it greatly resembles.” 
Unfortunately for itself, besides the name of giallone , which it receives in Italy 
from its yellow plumage, it is also known there as becquafiga , and as it becomes 
very fat after its summer feasting on fruits, retribution naturally follows. It is 
snared and exposed for sale in the poulterer’s shops at Naples, and is celebrated 
for its delicate flesh and savour as a bcccafico. 
Seeing how short its stay is, and how uncertain its visit to us, it need surprise 
no one that neither English poetry nor superstition have made use of its golden 
colours. Among the Romans Martial speaks of it as easily deceived by snares and 
nets when grapes are green, inferring that it becomes wiser as they ripen. Pliny 
has seized a glimmering of the truth when he relates how it builds its nest sus¬ 
pended like a cup from a twig, so that no quadruped can reach it; but forthwith 
trusts to Tuscan folk-lore when he goes on to say men confidently affirm that the 
Orioles themselves sleep hanging downwards by their legs, because they think this 
the safest posture. And here is another delightful scrap of folk-lore from the same 
author. If a sufferer from jaundice can only catch sight of an Oriole, he will at 
once be cured, owing to the bird’s yellow colour, and the Oriole itself will die. 
This kind of superstition lingered for many centuries, and is perhaps not yet wholly 
extinct among rustics. It gave birth to the mediaeval medical doctrine of signatures. 
If we turn to the American Oriole, however, Lowell introduces it in a pretty 
verse of his palinode, “Autumn”— 
“ Two watched yon Oriole’s pendent dome, 
That now is void and dank with rain, 
And one—O hope more frail than foam ! 
The bird to his deserted home 
Sings not—' We meet again ! ’ ” 
And the same writer has not forgotten it in his essay on “ My Garden Acquaint¬ 
ance.” His words may be quoted, as they exemplify some of the characteristics of 
the Continental Oriole, our occasional visitor—“ Orioles are in great plenty with me. 
I have seen seven males flashing about the garden at once. A merry crew of them 
swing their hammocks from the pendulous boughs. During one of these latter years 
when the canker-worms stripped our elms as bare as winter, these birds went to 
the trouble of rebuilding their unroofed nests, and chose for the purpose trees which 
are safe from those swarming vandals, such as the ash and the button-wood. One 
year a pair (disturbed, I suppose, elsewhere) built a second nest in an elm, within 
