"The third time she took a still tinier bit—so tiny that you could scarce see it; but it was the same story over again—the bannock was too big.

"'Well,' said Gertrude, 'I can't give you anything; you must just go without, for all these bannocks are too big.'

"Then our Lord waxeth wroth, and said. 'Since you loved me so little as to grudge me a morsel of food, you shall have this punishment—you shall become a bird and seek your food between bark and bole, and never get a drop to drink save when it rains.'

"He had scarce said the last word before she was turned into a great black woodpecker, or Gertrude's bird, and flew from her kneading trough right up the chimney; and till this very day you may see her flying about, with her red mutch on her head, and her body all black, because of the soot in the chimney; and so she hacks and taps away at the trees for her food, and whistles when rain is coming, for she is ever athirst, and then she looks for a drop to cool her tongue."

Brand informs us that "the woodpecker's cry denotes wet."

Grimm tells a German version of the story, in which the hard-hearted baker is a man, but whose wife and six daughters were made of more charitable materials. They privately bestowed what he had publicly refused, and were rewarded by being converted into the "seven stars" (the Pleiades), while the baker was transformed into a cuckoo. The cuckoo is believed to continue his spring cry only so long as the "seven stars" are visible in the heavens. Another version says the cuckoo was a baker's or miller's man. He cheated the poor, and "when the dough swelled by God's blessing in the oven, he drew it out and nipped off a portion of it, crying each time 'gukuk,' which signifies 'look! look!' For this crime he was converted into a cuckoo, and condemned to the perpetual repetition of the monotonous cry."

A Lancashire superstition exists referred to in Chapter IX., in which the plover is identified as the transmuted soul of a Jew. At least, when seven of them are seen together, they are called the "seven whistlers," and their musical chorus bodes ill or harm to those who hear it. The tradition represents them as the "souls of those Jews who assisted at the crucifixion, and in consequence were doomed to float in the air for ever."

Wordsworth, in his beautiful poem, "The White Doe of Rylstone," has preserved the memory of a Yorkshire tradition which asserts that the soul of the lady founder of Bolton Abbey revisited the ruins of the venerable pile, in the form of a spotless white doe.

When Lady Aäliza mourned
Her son, and felt in her despair,
The pang of unavailing prayer;
Her son in Wharf's abysses drowned,
The noble boy of Egremound,
From which affliction, when God's grace
At length had in her heart found place,
A pious structure fair to see,
Rose up this stately Priory!
The lady's work,—but now laid low;
To the grief of her soul that doth come and go,
In the beautiful form of this innocent doe:
Which, though seemingly doomed in its breast to sustain
A softened remembrance of sorrow and pain,
Is spotless, and holy, and gentle, and bright,—
And glides o'er the earth like an angel of light.

The Manx wren, the robin, and the stork are supposed to be inhabited by the souls of human beings. MacTaggart, speaking of the wren, says,—"Manx herring fishers dare not go to sea without one of these birds taken dead with them, for fear of disasters and storms. Their tradition is of a sea spirit that hunted the herring track, attended always by storms, and at last it assumed the figure of a wren and flew away. So they think that when they have a dead wren with them all is snug. The poor bird had a sad life of it in that singular island. When one is seen at any time, scores of Manxmen start and hunt it down." The stork in Prussia, on the contrary, is protected from injury, owing to the belief that "he is elsewhere a man." Gervase of Tilbury informs us that in England it was regarded as both bird and man. It was a very wide-spread belief that the human soul left its earthly tabernacle in the form of a bird. The "Milky-way" is, in Finland and Lithuania, the "Birds' way," or the "Way of Souls." Grimm tells us that every member of a certain Polish noble family are turned into eagles at death. He adds the eldest daughter of the Pileck line, if they die unmarried, are transformed into doves, but, if married, into owls. Kelly relates an anecdote of a gentleman in Soho, London, who believed that the departing soul of his brother-in-law, in the form of a bird, tapped at his window at the time of his death. The mother and sister, in Grimm's story of "The White and the Black Bride," push the true bride into the stream. At the same or the following moment a snow-white swan is discovered swimming gracefully down the river.