208 
The Animal-Lore of ShaJcspeare’s Time . 
And here and there the wand’ring eye to feed, 
Of scatter’d tufts of bulrushes and reed, 
Segges, longleaved willow, on whose bending spray. 
The py’d King-fisher, having got his prey, 
Sate with the small breath of the water shaken. 
Till he devour’d the fish that he had taken.” 
(The Man in the Moon.) 
Mr. Harting has referred to the wide-spread belief 
in the Halcyon days. William Browne in his pastoral 
poems speaks of— 
“ The mevy and the halcyon famosed 
For colours rare, and for the peaceful seas, 
Round the Sicilian coast, her brooding days.” 
( Britannia’s Pastorals , b. ii. song 1.) 
Montaigne (essay liv.) gives a full account from 
Plutarch of the structure of the kingfisher’s nest, and of 
the habits of the bird. 
G-iraldus Cambrensis calls the kingfisher the martinet. 
The French name of this bird is the martinet-feeheur. 
This author never allows any marvel to shake his faith by 
“supposing it a thing impossible.” He has preserved 
some curious folk-lore about the kingfisher:— 
“ It is remarkable in these little birds that, if they are preserved in 
a dry place, when dead, they never decay; and if they are put among 
clothes and other articles, they preserve them from the moth and give 
them a pleasant odour. What is still more wonderful, if, when dead,, 
they are hung up by their beaks in a dry situation, they change their 
plumage every year, as if they were restored to life, as though the 
vital spark still survived and vegetated through some mysterious 
remains of its energy.” (Topography of Ireland , 1187, ed. Wright, 
1813, p. 39.) 
The students of folk-lore are much beholden to their 
ancestors for this sublime credulity. Had they discarded 
such stories as absurd they would not have cared to 
record them, and the occupation of the students would 
have been largely gone. 
