Chapter XXVII of the Koran. It should be noted that all of these birds

are crested.

The veneration given to doves by the Mohammedans at Mecca is accounted for elsewhere; but swallows are held in almost equal reverence by both officials and pilgrims at that great shrine of Islam, and build their nests in the haram. This respect is explained by Keane[14] as the result of a belief that they were the instruments by which Mecca was saved from the Abyssinian (Christian) army that is known to have invaded Arabia in the year of Mohammed’s birth, and to have been disastrously expelled. The tradition is that God sent flocks of swallows, every bird carrying three small stones in its beak and two in its claws, which were dropped on the heads of the Abyssinians, and miraculously penetrated the bodies of men and elephants until only one of the invaders was left alive. He fled back to his country, and had just finished telling of the disaster to the king when one of the swallows, which had followed him from Mecca, dropped its pebble and killed him too. The kernel of this dramatic story is in the nineteenth section of the Koran:[59] “And he sent against them birds in flocks (ababils), claystones did he hurl down at them.” The historical explanation is that the Abyssinian invaders were destroyed by small-pox, the pustules of which are called in Arabic by a word meaning “small stones.”

Of a piece with these traditions and the Rabbinical tales of the Jews are the monkish legends preserved in early British chronicles, such as that by the Venerable Bede or by William of Malmesbury. The orthodox as well as dissenters had trouble with birds. Among the traditions of the celebrated Scotch-Irish missionary Columba (Latinized from his baptismal name Colum, “dove”) is one that once in his ardent youth Colum was trying to make by stealth in a church a copy of the psalter in possession of the selfish king, Finian of Donegal, who had refused the young enthusiast that privilege. A meddlesome stork, confined within the church, informed the sacristan, and Colum was arrested. Nevertheless by divine aid he got his copy, helpful to him afterward in his beneficent work in the Scottish highlands.

One of the prettiest of these old stories is that of St. Kenneth and the gulls.[22] One day about A. D. 550 the blackheaded gulls, flying as usual along the coast of Wales, and scanning the sea sharply for food or anything else interesting to a gull, found floating in a coracle—a round, wickerwork canoe—a human baby a day or two old, contentedly asleep on a pallet made of a folded purple cloth. Several gulls seized the corners of this cloth and so carried the child to the ledge of the Welsh cliff where they nested, plucked feathers from their breasts to make a soft bed, laid the baby on it, then hastened to fly inland and bring a doe to provide it with milk, for which an angel offered a brazen bell as a cup. There the blessed waif lived for several months; but one day, in the absence of all the gulls, a shepherd discovered the infant and took him down to his hut and his kind wife. The gulls, returning from the sea, heard of this act from the doe. They at once rushed to the shepherd’s cottage, again lifted the babe by the corners of its purple blanket, and bore him back to the ledge of their sea-fronting crag. There he stayed until he had grown to manhood—a man full of laughter and singing and kind words; and the Welsh peasants of the Gower Peninsula revered him and called him Saint Kenneth.

Somewhat similar is the legendary history of Coemagen, or Saint Kelvin, an Irish monk of the eighth century, into whose charge was committed the infant son of Colman, a Leinster noble. “Coemagen fed the child on the milk of a doe which came from the forest to the door of his cell. A raven was wont, after the doe had been milked, to perch on the bowl, and sometimes would upset it. ‘Bad luck to thee!’ exclaimed the saint. ‘When I am dead there will be a famous wake, but no scraps for thee and thy clan!’ When very old St. Kelvin moved into a forest hermitage, where the birds came to him as companions. Once, while praying, his supplicating palms outstretched, a blackbird (thrush) dropped her eggs into the hollow of his hands, and he held his arms rigid until the chicks hatched.”

A curious parallel to the last incident is quoted by the Baroness Martinengo-Caesaresco[20] “from an industrious translator” of the book _Tatchi-Lou-Lun_, describing how when a bird laid her eggs on the head of the first Buddha, which she mistook for the branch of a tree, he plunged himself into a trance so as not to move until the eggs had hatched and the young were flown.

St. Bede the younger, a contemporary of Coemagen, had a dove that used to come at his call; and an Irish monk, Comgall, would bid the swans near his residence come and cluster devotionally around his feet. Many saints, the legends declare, had authority over birds, and one, St. Millburg, abbess of Wenlock, in Shropshire, kept them out of the farmers’ crops by telling them it was naughty to despoil the grain. Of old, according to Canon Kingsley, St. Guthlac in Crowland said, as the swallows sat upon his knee, “He who leads his life according to the will of God, to him will the wild deer and the wild birds draw more near.”

The religious “hermits,” so prevalent at that period, were men who chose a more or less solitary life, quite as much, I suspect, on account of their love of nature as from purely devotional motives, and this was particularly true of those in Great Britain, exhibiting the characteristic British fondness for animal life. There was an early St. Bartholomew, for example, who in the sixth century or thereabout dwelt in seclusion on one of the Farne Islands off the northeastern coast of England, and made friends of the gulls and cormorants of the place. One of these he had tamed to eat out of his hand, and once, when Bartholomew was away fishing, a hawk pursued this poor bird into the chapel and killed it. Brother Bartholomew came in and found the hawk there with bloody talons and a shame-faced appearance. He caught it, kept it two days without food to punish it, then let it go. At another time, as he sat by the shore, a cormorant approached and pulled at his skirt, then led him to where one of its young had fallen into a crevice of the rocks whence the good man rescued it.

One of these rocky islets in the North Sea became so famous during the next century that it has been known ever since as Holy Isle, and the ruins of its monastery and cathedral still remain and may be seen from the railway train as it passes along the brink of the lofty coast a little south of Berwick-on-Tweed. This was the seat of the renowned Bishop Cuthbert of whom many quaint stories are told, apart from the record of his religious work. They attribute to his influence the extraordinary gentleness and familiarity characteristic of the eider duck, which is known to this day in Northumbria as Cuthbert’s bird. It was he, according to a narrative of a monk of the 13th century, who inspired these ducks with a hereditary trust in mankind by taking them as companions of his solitude when for several years he resided alone on Lindisfarne. There is good reason to accept this and similar traditions as largely true, for a like ability in “gentling” birds and other wild animals is manifested to-day by some persons of a calm and kindly sort.

Early in the eighth century a monk of intensely ascetic disposition, named Guthlac, retired to a solitary hermitage on an island in the dismal morasses of Lincolnshire, which afterward, if not then, was called Croyland or Crowland. He was sorely tempted by the Devil we are informed, and had many battles with “demons”—native British refugees hiding in the fens; but in the intervals of his fasting and fighting he got acquainted with the wild creatures about him. “The ravens, the beasts and the fishes,” says the record, “came to obey him. Once a venerable brother named Wilfred visited him, and ... suddenly two swallows came flying in ... and often they sat fearlessly on the shoulders of the holy man Guthlac, and then lifted up their song, and afterward they sat on his bosom and on his arms and his knees.... When Guthlac died angelic songs were heard in the sky, and all the air had a wondrous odor of exceeding sweetness.”

St. Kentigern, when a schoolboy, was wrongly accused of having twisted off the head of his master’s pet robin. He proved his innocence by putting the head and body together, whereupon the robin came to life and attended Kentigern until he became a great and good man. His master was St. Servan, and the robin was one that used to eat from his hand and perch on his shoulder, where it would twitter whenever Servan chanted the Psalms.

Here we encounter the mystical kind of story with which those old chroniclers like to embellish their biographies of holy men, and there was no limit to their credulity. Such is the tale of Carilef, a French would-be hermit of Ménàt, in Auvergne, who thought he was guided to set up a religious station because a wren had laid an egg in a hood that he had left hanging on a bush—a very wrenlike proceeding; and that was the foundation of the monastery about which the city of St. Calais grew in later times. Several other incidents of this kind are on record, showing that the value placed on any action by a bird that could be construed as a divine message. It is written that Editha, one of the early queens of England, persuaded her husband to found a religious house near Oxford on account of the omens she interpreted from the voice and actions of a certain magpie. Similarly the site for the abbey of Thierry, near Rheims, in France, was indicated to St. Theodoric, in the sixth century, by a white eagle circling around the top of the hill on which it subsequently was erected; and this miraculous eagle was seen year after year in the sky above it.

About that time Kenelm, son and heir of Kenulph, king of Wessex, was seven years old. His sister, who wanted to succeed to the throne in his place, procured his murder. The instant this was accomplished the fact was notified to the Pope, according to the _Chronicles_ of Roger de Wendover, by a white dove that alighted on the altar of St. Peter’s, bearing in its beak a scroll on which was written

In Clent cow-pasture, under a thorn, Of head bereft lies Kenelm, king-born.

The Pope sent word to England, the body was found in a thicket over which hung a pillar of supernal light, and was taken to Winchelcumb, in Gloucestershire, for burial; and at the spot near Halesowen, in Shropshire, where he was killed, Kenelm’s Chapel was erected.

But the most mystical legend in which birds are a part, is one familiar in Brittany. It is related of St. Leonore, a Welsh missionary who went to Brittany in the sixth century, to whom many fabulous powers and deeds are attributed, the most comprehensible of which Baring-Gould has put into verse. Leonore, with a band of followers, had decided to settle in Brittany on a desolate moor; but they had forgotten to bring any seed-wheat, and were alarmed.

Said the abbot, “God will help us In this hour of bitter loss.” Then one spied a little redbreast Sitting on a wayside cross.

Doubtless came the bird in answer To the words the monk did speak, For a heavy wheat-ear dangled From the robin’s polished beak.

Then the brothers, as he dropped it Picked it up and careful sowed; And abundantly in autumn Reaped the harvest where they strewed.[21]

Greater poets than Baring-Gould or even Bishop Trench have found literary material in these monastic tales. Witness Longfellow’s _Golden Legend_, where he sings of good St. Felix, the Burgundian missionary who crossed the Channel, and in A.D. 604 converted to Christianity the wild king of the East Saxons; and who listened to the singing of a milk-white bird for a hundred years, although it had seemed to him but an hour, so enchanted was he with the music. No doubt myth-mongers might discourse very scientifically on this and some other of these episodes in the penumbra of history, but we will leave the pleasure of it to them.

None of these traditions of early bird-lovers and teachers of kindness are so pleasant as are those inspired by the gracious life of St. Francis.[22] A familiar classic is his sermon to the birds when

Around Assisi’s convent gate The birds, God’s poor who cannot wait, From moor and mere and darksome wood Came flocking for their dole of food.

One of the prettiest Franciscan stories is that of the saint and the nightingale as presented by Mrs. Jamieson;[105] and, by the way, antiphonal singing with birds is related of several holy men and women of old:

As he was sitting with his disciple Leo, he felt himself penetrated with joy and consolation by the song of the nightingale ... and Francis began to sing, and when he stopped the nightingale took up the strain; and thus they sang alternately until the night was far advanced and Francis was obliged to stop for his voice failed. Then he confessed that the little bird had vanquished him. He called it to him, thanked it for its song, and gave it the remainder of his bread; and having bestowed his blessing upon it the creature flew away.

Longfellow has preserved in melodious verse that legend of the Spanish Charles V and the swallow that chose his tent as a site for its nest at a time when the emperor—

I forget in what campaign, Long besieged in mud and rain Some old frontier town of Flanders.

Yes, it was a swallow’s nest, Built of clay and hair of horse’s Mane, or tail, or dragoon’s crest, Found on hedgerows east and west After skirmish of the forces.

The headquarters staff were scandalized by the bird’s impudence, but Charles forbade their malice:

“Let no hand the bird molest,” Said he solemnly, “nor hurt her!” Adding then, by way of jest, “Golondrina is my guest, ’Tis the wife, of some deserter!”

So unharmed and unafraid Sat the swallow still and brooded, Till the constant cannonade Through the walls a breach had made, And the siege was thus concluded.

Then the army elsewhere bent Struck the tents as if disbanding, Only not the Emperor’s tent. For he ordered as he went, Very curtly, “Leave it standing.”

So it stood there all alone, Loosely flapping, torn and tattered, Till the brood was fledged and flown, Swinging o’er those walks of stone Which the cannon-shot had shattered.