A chough of as deep chat.[153]
In a passage in All’s Well that Ends Well where the ambush party are concocting some sort of gibberish to deceive the vainglorious Parolles, they agree to talk “Choughs’ language, gabble enough and good enough.”[154] When Puck recounts to Oberon what happened to the rustics when Bottom reappeared among them wearing the ass’s head, he gives an excellent description of the effect of the discharge of a fowling-piece at a bird-haunted cliff:
When they him spy,
As russet-pated choughs, many in sort,
Rising and cawing at the gun’s report,
Sever themselves and madly sweep the sky:
So, at his sight, away his fellows fly.[155]
The Chough together with the other members of the Crow family was thought to have a supernatural prophetic gift, and a faculty of revealing hidden deeds. Macbeth’s evil conscience was troubled with the thought that
Stones have been known to move and trees to speak;
Augures and understood relations have