human
Manx herring fishers dare not go to sea without one of these birds taken dead with them, for fear of disasters and storms. Their tradition is of a _sea spirit_ that hunted the _herring track_, attended always by storms, and at last it assumed the figure of a wren and flew away. So they think that when they have a dead wren with them all is snug. The poor bird had a sad life of it in that singular island. When one is seen at any time, scores of Manxmen start and hunt it down. The stork in Prussia, on the contrary, is protected from injury, owing to the belief that
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Gervase of Tilbury informs us that in England it was regarded as both bird and man. It was a very wide-spread belief that the human soul left its earthly tabernacle in the form of a bird. The
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Milky-way is, in Finland and Lithuania, the
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Birds' way, or the
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Way of Souls. Grimm tells us that every member of a certain Polish noble family are turned into eagles at death. He adds the eldest daughter of the Pileck line, if they die unmarried, are transformed into doves, but, if married, into owls. Kelly relates an anecdote of a gentleman in Soho, London, who believed that the departing soul of his brother-in-law, in the form of a bird, tapped at his window at the time of his death. The mother and sister, in Grimm's story of
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The White and the Black Bride,
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A Journey to Ashango-land; and further penetration into Equatorial Africa,