When my hens do crow,

Tell me if it be ominous or no? ?"

This was answered by another contributor whose reason is better than his rhyme:

"With crowing of your hens we will not twit ye, Since here they every day crow in the city; Thence thought no omen."

Besides the above-mentioned birds, which have generally been regarded as ominous of evil, there are others that on particular occasions or in certain places are of ill fame. Thus, in England it is thought to be an unlucky sign to have no money in one's pocket on hearing the cuckoo for the first time in a season. This bird is also considered of evil omen under similar circumstances by the Danes, and in Sweden it shares with the owl and the magpie the reputation of being a bird of sorcery. The swallow, which in classic times was of repute in auguries, is in some countries considered a messenger of life, in others the herald of death. In Ireland the vulgar call it the devil's bird, and believe there is a certain hair on every person's head which, if pecked off by a swallow, dooms the victim to eternal perdition. But in Scotland the pretty little yellow-hammer is dreaded as the devil's bird.

Doves in the possession of persons about to be married are supposed to bring bad luck, and they have sometimes been got rid of for this reason. If pigeons come into a house misfortunes are sure to follow. Their settling or a table forebodes sickness, and on a bed, death. When rooks desert a rookery the downfall of the family owning the estate is thereby portended, and if these

birds haunt a town or village, mortality awaits its inhabitants. Such are the superstitions still current in the British Islands. The peculiar cry of beangeese, on their flight southward from Scotland and Scandinavia, bears a singular resemblance to the yelping of beagles, and this is the origin of the superstitious belief in the spectral pack known as the Gabriel hounds. As these wild fowl select dark nights for their migration, it is not surprising that their strange unearthly cries should be considered ominous of approaching death. Wordsworth, in one of his sonnets, has connected this belief with the German legend of the Wild Huntsman who is doomed to chase the flying deer forever on aerial grounds. In some parts of Germany and Scotland the souls of unbaptized children are supposed to accompany the spectral pack as they sweep across the wintry sky. The wide-spread belief that unchristened babies have no rest after death, but are forced to wander in the air till the judgment-day, is thus blended with another equally curious.

There is a prevalent superstition that when birds fly round a house and rest on the window-sill, or tap against the pane, death is sure to follow. A pure white pigeon was thus believed to forebode calamity by a pious lady in Yorkshire, who, when her minister soon after fell dead in the pulpit, recalled the ominous occurrence. If there is sickness in a house the portent is peculiarly alarming. The crowing of a cock at night has caused superstitious servants to leave a family. Even the robin, which all over Christendom is regarded with affection and reverence, is in Scotland and some parts of England thought to be a prophet of death to the sick person who hears its song. Mr. S. Baring Gould thus refers to the belief among the boys at St. John's College, Hurstpierpoint, that when a death takes place a robin will enter the chapel, light upon the altar, and begin to sing: "Singularly enough, I saw this happen myself on one occasion. I happened to be in the chapel one evening at six

o'clock, when a robin entered at the open circular east window in the temporary apse, and lighting on the altar began to chirp. A few minutes later the passing bell began to toll for a boy who had just died." In one of the Familiar Letters of old James Howell there is a quaint description of a tombstone which he saw in a stone-cutter's shop in Fleet Street, in memory of four members of a family named Oxenham. The inscription stated that a bird with a white breast appeared to each of the deceased at the hour of death. The fact was attested by several witnesses whose names were engraved upon the stone, and Howell himself expresses his belief in it. A similar circumstance is mentioned in the memoirs of Lady Fanshawe. Two robin-redbreasts, as we learn from his biographer, appeared in midsummer in the sick chamber of Bishop Doyle, where they fluttered about, sometimes perching on his bed, until death released him. Among the occurrences which are said to have warned Thomas, Lord Lyttelton, of his approaching end, the appearance of a bird is one of the best authenticated.

It is easy for us to smile at the superstitions that have filled so many hearts with awe, and fancy loves to linger over the associations on which terror used to brood. But the old fear still haunts some natures, and cannot be driven out by science or charmed away by philosophy. To us the boding owl, the croaking raven, the solitary magpie, and the crowing hen, though no longer objects of dread, are more interesting because of the weird memories which they recall. In a prosaic age we cannot afford to let these traditions pass away. They lift us above the earthy level into the dreamland of sentiment and romance. Without them we lose the meaning of many facts and fancies of the olden time, and diminish our stock of pleasurable associations.

These beliefs, moreover, are symbolized and authenticated by our daily experience. Birds of ill omen abound in human society. There are men and

women to whom we feel an instinctive aversion, based upon an intuitive perception of their evil influence; croakers, worse than the maligned raven, who delight to peck at the weaknesses of men, but do not appreciate their better qualities; purblind owls, that can only blink in the sunshine of honesty, but hoot as they fly about at midnight, disturbing the peace of society; gossiping magpies, who carry scandal on their baleful wings, and forebode domestic discomfort and unhappiness. Nor will truth allow us to omit the crowing hens, the viragoes of social life, Xantippes upon whom even Socratic wisdom is thrown away. Though their dusky hues set off the bright plumage of their cheerful sisters, yet they cast a shadow which no sunshine can dispel. Then there is the numerous family of bores, that flap their leaden wings through every open door. The game laws of society forbid their destruction. The satirist cannot penetrate their toughened cuticle, and the morbid anatomist dulls his scalpel on their indurated sensibilities.

But there are more detestable creatures still. We need not read Tennyson to learn that the carrion vulture waits for the warbler at the gates of fame; that genius and worth are the congenial quarry of the rapacious hunters of men. They gnaw at the vitals of the new Prometheus, and strive to rend the reputations which are their perpetual reproach. Nor can such ghoulish creatures justify themselves by the example of the feathered biped. The bird of prey only follows the promptings of his nature, which he is powerless to change. He is not to blame because he has an instinct for garbage, and loves darkness better than light. But a reasonable creature has no such excuse. Being free to choose between good and evil, he is justly held responsible for the results of his choice. If he is so far perverted as to find enjoyment in the misfortunes of his fellows, if by his dark and crooked ways he becomes an object of dread to honest men and women, he must expect to be stigmatized as a bird of ill omen. Alexander Young.

IV.

OF THE TIME WHEN MONEY WAS "EASY."

It seems a remarkable fact that during the late Congressional travail with the currency question, no one of the people in or out of Congress, who were concerned lest there should not be enough money in the country to " move the crops," ever took upon himself the pleasing task of rehearsing the late Confederacy's financial story, for the purpose of showing by example how simple and easy a thing it is to create wealth out of nothing by magic revolutions of the printing-press, and to make rich, by act of Congress, everybody not too lazy to gather free dollars into a pile. The story has all the flavor of the Princess Scheherezade's romances, with the additional merit of being historically true. For once a whole people was rich. Money was easy" enough to satisfy everybody, and everybody had it in unstinted measure. This money was not, it is true, of a quality to please the believers in a gold or other arbitrary standard of value, but that is a matter of little consequence, now that senators and representatives of high repute have shown that the best currency possible is that which exists only by the will of the government, and the volume of which is regulated by the cravings of the people alone. That so apt an illustration of the financial views of the majority in Congress should have been wholly neglected during last winter's discussions, seems therefore unaccountable.

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The financial system adopted by the Confederate government was singularly simple and free from technicalities. It consisted chiefly in the issue of treasury notes enough to meet all the expenses of the government, and in the present advanced state of the art of printing there was but one difficulty incident to this

process; namely, the impossibility of having the notes signed in the Treasury Department, as fast as they were needed. There happened, however, to be several thousand young ladies in Richmond willing to accept light and remunerative employment at their homes, and as it was really a matter of small moment whose name the notes bore, they were given out in sheets to these young ladies, who signed and returned them, for a consideration. I shall not undertake to guess how many Confederate treasury notes were issued. Indeed, I am credibly informed by a gentleman who was high in office in the Treasury Department, that even the secretary himself did not certainly know. The acts of Congress authorizing issues of currency were the hastily formulated thought of a not very wise body of men, and my informant tells me they were frequently susceptible of widely dif ferent construction by different officials. However that may be, it was clearly out of the power of the government ever to redeem the notes, and whatever may have been the state of affairs within the treasury, nobody outside its precincts ever cared to muddle his head in an attempt to get at exact figures.

We knew only that money was astonishingly abundant. Provisions fell short sometimes, and the supply of clothing was not always as large as we should have liked, but nobody found it difficult to get money enough. It was to be had almost for the asking. And to some extent the abundance of the currency really seemed to atone for its extreme badness. Going the rounds of the pickets on the coast of South Carolina, one day, in 1863, I heard a conversation between a Confederate and a Union soldier, stationed on opposite sides of a little inlet, in the course of which this point was brought out.

Union Soldier. Are n't times rather hard over there, Johnny?

Confederate Soldier. Not at all. We've all the necessaries of life. U. S. Yes; but how about luxuries? You never see any coffee nowadays, do you?

C. S. Plenty of it.

U. S. Isn't it pretty high?

C. S. all.

U. S. Whew! Don't you call that high?

C. S. (after reflecting). Well, perhaps it is a trifle uppish, but then you never saw money as plentiful as it is with us. We hardly know what to do with it, and don't mind paying high prices for things we want.

And that was the universal feeling. Money was so easily got, and its value was so utterly uncertain, that we were never able to determine what was a fair price for anything. We fell into the habit of paying whatever was asked, knowing that to-morrow we should have to pay more. Speculation became the easiest and surest thing imaginable. The speculator saw no risks of loss. Every article of merchandise rose in value every day, and to buy anything this week and sell it next was to make an enormous profit quite as a matter of course. So uncertain were prices, or rather so constantly did they tend upward, that when a cargo of cadet gray cloths was brought into Charleston once, an officer in my battery, attending the sale, was able to secure enough of the cloth to make two suits of clothes, without any expense whatever, merely by speculating upon an immediate advance. He became the purchaser, at auction, of a case of the goods, and had no difficulty, as soon as the sale was over, in finding a merchant who was glad to take his bargain off his hands, giving him the cloth he wanted as a premium. The officer could not possibly have paid for the case of goods, but there was nothing surer than that he could sell again at an advance the moment the auctioneer's hammer fell on the last lot of cloths.

Naturally enough, speculation soon fell into very bad repute, and the epi

The prices which obtained were almost fabulous, and singularly enough there seemed to be no sort of ratio existing between the values of different articles. I bought coffee at forty dollars and tea at thirty dollars a pound on the same day.

My dinner at a hotel cost me twenty dollars, while five dollars gained me a seat in the dress circle of the theatre. I paid one dollar the next morning for a copy of the Examiner, but I might have got the Whig, Dispatch, Enquirer, or Sentinel, for half that sum. For some

wretched tallow candles I paid ten dollars a pound. The utter absence of proportion between these several prices is apparent, and I know of no way of explaining it except upon the theory that the unstable character of the money had superinduced a reckless disregard of all value on the part of both buyers and sellers. A facetious friend used to say prices were so high that nobody could see them, and that they "got mixed for want of supervision." He held, however, that the difference between the old and the new order of things was a trifling one. "Before the war," he said, "I went to market with the money in my pocket, and brought back my purchases in a basket; now I take the money in the basket, and bring the things home in my pocket."

As I was returning to my home after the surrender at Appomattox Court House, a party of us stopped at the residence of a planter for supper, and as the country was full of marauders and horse thieves, deserters from both armies, bent upon indiscriminate plunder, our host set a little black boy to watch

our horses while we ate, with instructions to give the alarm if anybody should approach. After supper we dealt liberally with little Sam. Silver and gold we had none, of course, but Confederate money was ours in great abundance, and we bestowed the crisp notes upon the guardian of our horses, to the extent of several hundreds of dollars. A richer person than that little negro I have never seen. Money, even at par, never carried more of happiness with it than did these promises of a dead government to pay. We frankly told Sam that he could buy nothing with the notes, but the information brought no sadness to his simple heart.

"I don' want to buy nothin', master," he replied. "I's gwine to keep dis always.'

I fancy his regard for the worthless paper, merely because it was called money, was closely akin to the feeling which had made it circulate among better-informed people than he. Everybody knew, long before the surrender, that these notes never could be redeemed. Very few of us hoped, during the last two years of the war, that the "ratification of a treaty of peace between the Confederate States and the United States," on which the payment was conditioned, would ever come. We knew the paper was worthless, and yet it continued to circulate. It professed to be money, and on the strength of that profession people continued to take it in payment for goods. The amount of it for which the owner of any article would part with his possession was always uncertain. Prices were regulated largely by accident, and were therefore wholly incongruous.

But the disproportion between the prices of different articles was not greater than that between the cost of goods imported through the blockade and their selling price. The usual custom of blockade-running firms was to build or buy a steamer in Europe, bring it to Nassau in ballast, and load it there with assorted merchandise. Selling this cargo in Charleston or Wilmington for

Confederate money, they would buy cotton with which to reload the ship for her outward voyage. The owner of many of these ships once told me that if a vessel which had brought in one cargo were lost with a load of cotton on her outward voyage, the owner would lose nothing, the profits on the merchandise being fully equal to the entire value of ship and cotton. If he could get one cargo of merchandise in, and one of cotton out, the loss of the ship with a second cargo of merchandise would still leave him a clear profit of more than a hundred per cent. upon his investment. And this was due solely to the abnormal state of prices in the country, and not at all to the management of the blockade-runners. They sold their cargoes at auction, and bought cotton in the open market.

Their merchandise brought fabulous prices, while cotton, for want of a market, remained disproportionately low. That the merchants engaged in this trade were in no way the authors of the state of prices may be seen from two facts. First, if I am correctly informed, they uniformly gave the government an opportunity to take such articles as it had need of, and especially all the quinine imported, at the price fixed in Richmond, without regard to the fact that speculators would pay greatly more for the goods. In one case within my own knowledge a heavy invoice of quinine was sold to the government for eleven hundred dollars an ounce, when a speculator stood ready to take it at double that price. Secondly, the cargo sales were peremptory, and speculators sometimes combined and bought a cargo con siderably below the market price, by appearing at the sale in such numbers as to exclude all other bidders. In one case, I remember, the general commanding at Charleston annulled a cargo sale on this account, and sent some of the speculators to jail for the purpose of giving other people an opportunity to purchase needed goods at prices very much higher than those forced upon the sellers by the combination at the first sale.

In the winter of 1863-64 Congress