"One's joy, two's a greet [crying], Three's a wedding, four's a sheet [winding sheet]." The _burree churree_, an Indian night bird, preys upon dead bodies. The Mohammedans say that should a drop of the blood of a corpse, or any part of it, fall from this bird's beak on a human being, he will die at the end of forty days. _The Crossbill._ There is an odd superstition connected with the crossbill, in Thuringia, which makes the wood-cutters very careful of the nests. This bird in captivity is subject to many diseases, such as weak eyes, swelled and ulcerated feet, etc., arising probably from the heat and accumulated vapors of the stove-heated rooms where they are kept. The Thuringian mountaineer believes that these wretched birds can take upon themselves any diseases to which he is subject, and always keeps some near him. He is satisfied that a bird whose upper mandible bends to the right, has the power of transferring colds and rheumatisms from man to itself; and if the mandible turns to the left, he is equally certain that the bird can render the same service to the women. The crossbill is often attacked with epilepsy, and the Thuringians drink every day the water left by the bird, as a specific against that disease. _The Ostrich._ The ancient myth about the ostrich was that she did not hatch her eggs by setting upon them, but by the rays of light and warmth from her eyes. Southey alludes to this in "Thalaba"— With such a look as fables say The mother ostrich fixes on her eggs, Till that intense affection Kindle its light of life. _Honoring the Lark._ In Russia, on the 9th of March, the day on which the larks are supposed to arrive, the rustics make clay images of those birds, smear them with honey, tip their heads with tinsel, and then carry them about, singing songs to spring, or to Lada, their vernal goddess. _The Nightingale._ Milton's exquisite sonnet to the nightingale makes pointed reference to the fancy that her song portended success in love. Faber, in the "Cherwell Water Lily," gives an angelic character to the strains of the nightingale. The classical fable of the unhappy Philomela may have given origin to the conception that the nightingale sings with its breast impaled upon a thorn. The earliest notice of this myth by an English poet is, probably, that in the "Passionate Pilgrim" of Shakespeare— "Everything doth banish moan, Save the nightingale alone. She, poor bird, as all forlorn, _Lean'd her breast up till a thorn_, And there sung the dolefull'st ditty, That to hear it was great pity." _The Blackbird originally White._