Here in Shropshire, in spite of the superstition that she was under special Divine Providence, the wren was often hunted at Yule-tide. Gangs of boys used formerly to chase poor Jenny with sticks, in and out of hedgerows, and over banks and stones. Particularly did this ignoble sport take place on the sides of the Clee Hills, and on the flanks of the Wrekin. Now, happily, the time of persecution is past, and Jenny no longer suffers ill from the hands of men. Hopping fearlessly near me was the pet robin that I fed through the evil days of snow and frost. How gorgeous he looked, with his scarlet waistcoat, how sleek and plump; and how full and liquid was his great brown eye. I begged Burbidge to leave, as last year, the old iron kettle in the arbour of honeysuckle, where he and Madam had their nest and reared their offspring last spring. How tame she was, with her little breast of yellowish brown and her liquid great eyes that used to watch me so keenly when I looked down upon her in the kettle. How patiently she sat, and how sweetly he sang to her, amongst the blossoms, his whole throat moving with his trilling rapture. For two years he and "Madam Buttons" have built in the kettle and brought up their nestlings there, and preferred that site to a hole in bank or wall, branch of tree, or to the thick shelter of the yews. The robin is looked upon in Shropshire as a sacred bird. Folks here believe that some terrible calamity will surely overtake him who robs a nest or kills "God's cock." A poor woman once gravely told me that her little son's arm was withered, "be like," she considered, "that he had robbed a robin's nest." "Him who slays a robin, may look to his special damnation," an old man once said to me, who had seen what he termed a "gallous lad" throw a stone at one. "Why thee cannot be content to rob the other birds, and leave God Almighty's fowls alone, I canna' understand," was also an angry remark I once heard addressed by a mother to a seven-year-old lad, and the remark was followed by sharp correction with a hazel switch. The old fear of, and reverence for the robin comes doubtless from the legend that the robin pricked his breast against the nails of the cross, and ministered by song and devotion to the Divine Master in His agony, and thus gained for himself and for all his posterity the affection of God, and the gratitude of man. In the old miracle plays the robin was often spoken of as "God's bird," and this also may have gained for him the love of many generations.