Raven-like again, the owl is a specific for the gout, all that is necessary being to “take an owl, pull off her feathers, salt her well for a weak, then put her into a pot and stop it close, and put her into an oven, that so she may be brought into a mummy.” This has then to be beaten into a powder and mixed with boar’s grease, and “the grieved place” well anointed with this preparation. Owl-broth has in many rural districts of England been regarded as invaluable in whooping cough. The notion of stones of mystic virtue being found in divers animals is a very common one in ancient and mediæval lore. We have already referred to the raven-stone, and many others were sought after. The interior of a fowl was said to yield a precious stone called alectorius; the chelidonius came from a swallow, geranites from a crane, and draconites from a dragon; while corvia was the name of the stone obtained from the crow. Anyone who cares to penetrate farther into this mass of rubbish will find plenty of it in the “Mirror of Stones” of Camillus. A stone from the hoopoe, when laid upon the breast of a sleeping man, forced him to reveal any rogueries he might have committed. The swallow was believed by some people to have two of these precious stones stowed away somewhere in its interior; one of these was a red one, and cured insanity; while the other, a black one, brought good fortune. Others said that the swallow found by some inspiration a particular kind of stone on the seashore, and that this stone restored sight to the blind. It will be remembered that Longfellow, in his “Evangeline,” refers to this fancy in the lines:— “Seeking with eager eyes that wondrous stone which the swallow Brings from the shore of the sea, to restore the sight of her fledglings.”[95] Hence people assumed, not unreasonably, that what the bird found of such value to its young ones could scarcely fail to be of equal value for suffering humanity. Sometimes the association of the swallow with blindness is much more recondite. Thus Marcellus, writing in the year of our era, 480 A.D., advises one who fears that he is going blind to “look out for the first swallow, then run silently to the nearest spring, wash your eyes, and pray God that you may be free from it that year;” and then, with the callousness that is so characteristic of so many of these folk-lore remedies, very needlessly adds, “and that all the pain may pass into the swallow.”