ear a noise?" and Lady Macbeth answers:

"I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry"; and the scene in _Richard
III_, where Richard interrupts a messenger of evil news with the words:

"Out on ye, owls! Nothing but songs of death?"

Gray speaks of "moping" owls; Chatterton exclaims, "Harke! the dethe
owle loude dothe synge"; whilst Hogarth introduces the same bird in the
murder scene of his _Four Stages of Cruelty_.

Nor is the belief in the sinister prophetic properties of the owl
confined to the white races; we find it everywhere--among the Red
Indians. West Africans, Siamese, and Aborigines of Australia.

In Cornwall, and in other corners of the country, the crowing of a cock
at midnight was formerly regarded as indicating the passage of death
over the house; also if a cock crew at a certain hour for two or three
nights in succession, it was thought to be a sure sign of early death to
some member of the household. In _Notes and Queries_ a correspondent
remarks that crowing hens are not uncommon, that their crow is very
similar to the crow of a very young cock, and must be taken as a certain
presagement of some dire calamity.

It was generally held that in all haunted localities the ghosts would at
once vanish--not to appear again till the following night--at the first
crowing of the cock after midnight. I believe there is a certain amount
of truth in this--at all events cocks, as I myself have proved, are
invariably sensitive to the presence of the superphysical.

The whistler is also a very psychic bird. Spenser, in his _Faerie
Queene_ (Book II, canto xii, st. 31), alludes to it thus:--

"The whistler shrill, that whoso hears doth die";

whilst Sir Walter Scott refers to it in a similar sense in his _Lady of
the Lake_.

The yellow-hammer was formerly the object of much persecution, since it
was believed that it received three drops of the devil's blood on its
feather every May morning, and never appeared without presaging ill
luck. Parrots do not appear to be very susceptible to the influence of
the Unknown, and indicate little or no dread of superphysical
demonstrations.

Doves, wrens, and robins are birds of good omen, and the many
superstitions regarding them are all associated with good luck. Doves, I
have found in particular, are very safe psychic barometers in haunted
houses.

It is almost universally held to be unlucky to kill a robin. A
correspondent of _Notes and Queries_ (Fourth Series