ANIMAL MYTHOLOGY.

Waikato Times, Volume XXI, Issue 1729, 4 August 1883, Page 3

A NIMAL M YTHOL OG Y.

The nightingale's song, Avhich it has often beon attempted to uitangc in syllables of human speech, is in Westphalia an anged in tins way, h tU, h tit, to wil, to wit,— Tnzy, Tnzy, Tnzy, to hut hi, to but/it, to bue/tt. Now, the last syllables* foi m the shepherd's cry to his dog when he wishes the sheep collected. He then lies the germ for a myth. Tnzy must be the dog to whom the cry "to btu/it" is ackhe&sed. Accordingly the nightingale is a shepherdess, who was once unkind to a shepherd that loved her ; she was always promising but postponing marriage, till at last the shepherd could bear it no longer, and uttered the wish that she might not sleep till the day of judgment. Nor docs she ; for her voice may be always heaid at night, and she cues to buc/it, to bitch t, to bin /if, to her good dog Tnzy. Why has tho sliaid or flounder a face that is all awry, with its eyes on one side of it, and not stiaight like those of most other fish ? Its face was like theirs once, they say, till it made a mocking face at a passing herring, and addressed it with an insulting question ; for punish ment, it could ne\ei didw its face back straight again. But the same account should bo given of the tnrbot, the pole, the scale, tiie dab, the whiff, tho plaice, and the halibut, for they all have the same peiuhai foimatiou of the eyeb. Ib i& a common belief that the cuckoo is a tran&toimed gul, calling her biotlier. InScixia the cuckoo, luhttvtlz<<, was a gnl who lamented her bi other's death so long that she was tinned into a cuckoo. This in itself is not \ cry circumstantial, but Albania supplies a more complete story. There was once two biotheis and a sister. The latter accidentally killed one of them by getting up suddenly fiom her needlework and pictcmg him to the heart with her scissors. She and her surviving bi other mourned so much that they wcic turned into biids; lie cues out to the lost brother by night 'itnn, (/ion, and &lieby clay Lie Lit, Lit /,n, w nidi means, " Where are you '!" The cuckoo, says the Bohemian legend, once had a ciovvu on hci head, till, at a wedding among the biids, at which the hoopoe was biidegi oom, she lent it and lias never been able to get it back. Jle is always crying out Khthit, which means " You rascal," to which the other leplics /tin, )tht, "Iconic, I come," but comes not. The Bohemians also take the cuckoo for an enchanted miller or bakct. The lattui is the moie mteiestint,' story, as being cither of post-Christian origin, or ! else a pagan memoiy tiansfened, as so oiten happened, into a Christian dress. Cluist, parsing one day a baker's shop, sentone of his disciples in to ask torsome new biead. The baker lefused to give it, but his wife and six daughteis, who were more compa'-S'onate, doliveied some pecretly to the disciple. In reward, they vveie placed among the stars, as the Pleiades ; but the baker was turned into a cuckoo, and it confirms this story, that his cry is heaid as long as those seven st.us me visible in the sky. Tn Poland long ago it was a capital ci line to kill a cuckoo. The appaient leason was that Zywiec, (who in old Sahonic mythology was mler of the umvcise, used to change himself (as Zeus once did, and India, too), into a cuckoo, in order to announce to inoitals the number of years the} had to live ; a belief so leal that multitudes used to flock eveiy May to Zywi o a temple on the mounta'n that was called attei his name, to pi ay foi a long life and piospeious health. To tins day it is a common ai tide of folklore belief that so many yeais yet lemain to a man of life as he heais the cuckoo's voice for the fiist time in the spring. And a monkish historian has handed down, for tho edification of posleiity, the stoiy of that wordly-minded brother who, tiied of the monotony of convent life, resolved to ask of the cuckoo the number of yoais yet allotted him to live. The bud said twenty-two. The monk lesolvcd to dovote,himself for a season to the pleasures ot this world, and yet have tune befoie him to piepare for the next : but alas ! the biid was a heathenish and theiefoie a false oracle to listen to, and death surprised the'reereant monk in the twentieth year, still absorbed in temporal enjoyments and vanities, — (Jornlull Mat/a, zino.

" Yks, the electric light is a great mill vention,'' said Flibber, as he fumbled around his front door, "a great invention ; and every keyhole should have one."