In England, also, is the Cricket’s chirp sometimes looked upon as prognosticating death. “When Blonzelind expired,” Gay, in his Pastoral Dirge, says,
And shrilling Crickets in the chimney cry’d.[278]
So also in Reed’s Old Plays is the Cricket’s cry ominous of death:
And the strange Cricket i’ th’ oven sings and hops.
The same superstition is found in the following line from the Œdipus of Dryden and Lee:
Owels, ravens, Crickets, seem the watch of death.
Gaule mentions, among other vain observations and superstitious ominations thereupon, “the Cricket’s chirping behind the chimney stack, or creeping on the foot-pace.”[279]
Dr. Nathaniel Horne, after saying that “by the flying and crying of ravens over their houses, especially in the dusk of evening, and when one is sick, they conclude death,” adds, “the same they conclude of a Cricket crying in a house where there was wont to be none.”[280]
“Some sort of people,” says Mr. Ramsay, in his Elminthologia, “at every turn, upon every accident, how are they therewith terrified! If but a Cricket unusually appear, or they hear but the clicking of a Death-watch, as they call it, they, or some one else in the family, shall die!”[281]
Gilbert White, the accurate naturalist of Selborne, speaking of Crickets, says: “They are the house-wife’s barometer, foretelling her when it will rain; and are prognostics sometimes, she thinks, of ill or good luck, of the death of a near relation, or the approach of an absent lover. By being the constant companions of her solitary hours, they naturally become the objects of her superstition.”[282]