“Far, far away, O ye
Halcyons of memory,
Seek some far calmer nest
Than this abandoned breast.”
And in Milton and Dryden, and Kirke White and Coleridge, and ever so many more. Another belief, which, strange to say, still holds its own in England, is that a dead halcyon hung up will turn its beak always in the direction of the wind. So Shakespeare says of courtiers who “turn their halcyon beaks with every gale and vary of their masters”; and Marlowe, before him, asks “How now stands the wind? Into what corner peers my halcyon’s bill?”
But oddest of all is the following superstition from an English book of the twelfth century:—“These little birds, if they are preserved in a dry place, when dead never decay; and if they are put among clothes and other articles, they preserve them from the moth and give them a pleasant odour. What is still more wonderful, if when dead they are hung up by their beaks in a dry situation, they change their plumage every year, as if they were restored to life, as though the vital spark still survived and vegetated through some mysterious remains of its energy.”
None of our British birds probably feels a severe winter more keenly than the kingfisher, for when the streams are frost-bound and icicles hang from the willows where it used to perch so blithely in the summer days, the little creature is in a desperate plight. Insect-eating birds have a last resource in berries and vegetable food, but the kingfisher, when the streams are frozen and the ponds all ice-locked, has nothing to fall back upon, and so he wanders off to the seashore and the mouths of rivers that are still open. “Even here,” says a writer, “the poor kingfisher often fares badly, and after an unusual spell of frost numbers of them are picked up starved to death. Sometimes they are found frozen to the branch on which they have been sitting.” But in open weather its life is as joyous as any bird’s can be, and is passed among the prettiest of scenery.
You will note, or may fancy that you do, that it is
