habits, cries, or colours
and shapes of animals. The Ojibbeways told Kohl they had a story for
every creature, accounting for its ways and appearance. Among the
Greeks, as among Australians and Bushmen, we find that nearly every
notable bird or beast had its tradition. The nightingale and the
swallow have a story of the most savage description, a story reported
by Apollodorus, though Homer(1) refers to another, and, as usual, to
a gentler and more refined form of the myth. Here is the version of
Apollodorus. "Pandion" (an early king of Athens) "married Zeuxippe, his
mother's sister, by whom he had two daughters, Procne and Philomela, and
two sons, Erechtheus and Butes. A war broke out with Labdas about some
debatable land, and Erechtheus invited the alliance of Tereus of Thrace,
the son of Ares. Having brought the war, with the aid of Tereus, to a
happy end, he gave him his daughter Procne to wife. By Procne, Tereus
had a son, Itys, and thereafter fell in love with Philomela, whom
he seduced, pretending that Procne was dead, whereas he had really
concealed her somewhere in his lands. Thereon he married Philomela, and
cut out her tongue. But she wove into a robe characters that told
the whole story, and by means of these acquainted Procne with her
sufferings. Thereon Procne found her sister, and slew Itys, her own son,
whose body she cooked, and served up to Tereus in a banquet. Thereafter
Procne and her sister fled together, and Tereus seized an axe and
followed after them. They were overtaken at Daulia in Phocis, and prayed
to the gods that they might be turned into birds. So Procne became the
nightingale, and Philomela the swallow, while Tereus was changed into a
hoopoe."(2) Pausanias has a different legend; Procne and Philomela died
of excessive grief.

(1) Odyssey, xix. 523.

(2) A Red Indian nightingale-myth is alluded to by J. G. Muller, Amerik.
Urrel., p. 175. Some one was turned into a nightingale by the sun, and
still wails for a lost lover.

These ancient men and women metamorphosed into birds were HONOURED AS
ANCESTORS by the Athenians.(1) Thus the unceasing musical wail of the
nightingale and the shrill cry of the swallow were explained by a
Greek story. The birds were lamenting their old human sorrow, as the
honey-bird in Africa still repeats the name of her lost son.

(1) Pausanias, i. v. Pausanias thinks such things no longer occur.

Why does the red-robin live near the dwellings of men, a bo