The mythical character and medical qualities of red cow's milk have been referred to in the previous chapter.
Lightning birds were supposed to come "down to earth either as incorporations of the lightning, or bringing with them a branch charged with latent or invisible fire." The eagle or the falcon was the form which Agni, the fire-god, assumed on such occasions. The fire-birds were very numerous, and included the woodpecker, the robin, the wren, the owl, the cuckoo, the stork, the swallow, and the hoopoe. Kelly quotes the Herefordshire rhyme as evidence that the ancient superstition respecting the wren is still alive in England, as well as in France, Scotland, Wales, and the Isle of Man. The peasants there say:—
Robin Redbreast and Jenny Wren
Are God Almighty's cock and hen.
In Lancashire, however, the rhyme is:—
A robin and a wren
Are God's cock and hen.
And it is generally followed by the intimation that
A spink and a sparrow
Are the devil's bow and arrow.
To kill or rob the nests of these sacred birds was supposed to hazard the destruction of the culprit's residence by lightning. A Cornish rhyme says:—
Those who kill a robin or a wran
Will never prosper, boy or man.
In the "laying" of the redoubted Grislehurst boggart, it is not improbable, as ghosts are not easily coffined in a corporeal sense, that some superannuated old rooster, who had disturbed the bodily rest, and scared the wits of the neighbouring rustics by some untoward cock-a-doodle-doing, furnished all that was really "laid" in the mysterious grave referred to. An impression may have been entertained that the troublesome elf who had turned the household topsy-turvy had made the said rooster's corpus his temporary earthly tabernacle. Perhaps the "wise men" of the hamlet vainly imagined that nought was required but the driving of a "stoop" through the feathered repository to utterly "squelch" its ghostly occupant.