CHAPTER XVI.
Superstitions Generally.
“Even a single hair casts a shadow.”
—Lord Verulam.
Editor’s Note.—In this chapter are collected all the loose and unclassified bits of Folk-Lore scattered among Sir Edgar MacCulloch’s manuscripts.
The widely-diffused idea that the spirits of the dead sometimes return in the form of birds, is not altogether obsolete in these islands.
A widow, whose husband had been drowned at sea, asked the Seigneur of Sark whether a robin that was constantly flying round her cottage and alighting on her window-sill, might not possibly be the soul of the departed.[241]
The robin is a bird specially reverenced in Guernsey, as the widely-accepted belief is that it was the robin who first brought fire to the island. In bringing it across the water he burned his breast, and this is the reason why, to this day, the breast of the robin is tinged with red. “My mother,” said the old woman who told me this, “had a great veneration for this little bird, which had been so great a benefactor to those who came before us, for who can live without fire.”[242]