Recently I tried in vain to get some such book dealing with the folklore and mythology of the bat. And yet in the traditional lore of all countries there are many allusions to this ‘blind bird of the dusk.’ The Greeks, the Romans, the Celts of Europe, the westering Gaels, had many legends and superstitions connected with it. To-day the Finn, the Magyar, the Basque and the island Gael keep some of the folklore that has ebbed away from other nations, or become confused or remembered only by old folk in old out-of-the-way places. Somewhere I have notes of several bat-legends and fragments of bat-lore collected once for a friend, who after all went ‘to hunt the bat’ before he could use them. That was the phrase which started the quest. He had read it, or heard it I think, and wrote to me asking if I had ever heard the phrase ‘to hunt the bat’ as synonymous with death. I have heard it once or twice in the last few years, and once in a story where the teller, speaking of an outlaw who was a great deer-hunter in the wilds of Inverness, was found dead ‘with the fork of an ash-root through his breast, pinned like a red fox he was, and he by that time hunting the bat in the black silence.’ It would be inapposite, here, to linger on this theme, but I am tempted to record one or two of these bat-lore fragments which I recall: and perhaps, from the scarcity of such traditional flotsam and jetsam, some readers and bat-lovers may be interested. The bat, commonly called in Gaelic _an ialtag_, or _dialtag_, though even in the one Shire of Argyll at least six other common names might as likely be heard, is occasionally poetically called the _Bàdharan-dhu_, the dark wandering one. I remember being told that the reason of the name was as follows. In the early days of the world the bat was blue as the kingfisher and with a breast white as that of the swallow, and its eyes were so large and luminous that because of this and its whirling flight its ancient name was a name signifying ‘flash-fire’--though now become, with the Gaelic poet who told me this, _dealan-dhu badhalaiche choille_, ‘the little black wandering flame of the woods.’ But on the day of the Crucifixion the bat mocked at the agony of the Saviour, and while the redbreast was trying to pull out a thorn, now from Christ’s hand, now from His foot, the bat whirled to and fro crying, ‘See how lovely I am! See how swift I am!’ Christ turned His eyes and looked at it, and the blue and the white went out of the bat like the ebbing wave out of a pool, and it became blind and black and whirled away till it met the rising of night and was drowned in that darkness for evermore. And that is why the bat is seen in the dusk and at night, and wheels to and fro in such aimless wandering flight, with his thin almost inaudible voice crying, ‘See how blind I am! See how ugly I am!’