the newly married pair. The circumstance of the dust-cloud is exactly similar to the mist wherein the Slavonic Vampire conveys himself, but the transformation of the Vampire into a bird is scarcely to be met with in European tradition. Crows, rooks, and ravens may sometimes vaguely held to be unlucky, but they are generally associated with weather-lore, although Justus Doolittle in his Social Life of the Chinese[34] says that the appearance of a crow at a wedding in China was always considered most ominous. In various parts of England, particularly in Essex, to see a crow flying alone, or if a crow flies towards you, it is considered a sign of bad luck. In Worcestershire they say that: “When a single crow flies over you, it is the sign of a funeral; two are a certain prognostication of a wedding.”[35] The old saw is well-known with reference to crows:[36]
One’s unlucky,
Two’s lucky,
Three is health,
Four is wealth,
Five is sickness,
Six is death.
The raven was often held to denote sickness and death and his croak sounded a knell. So in The Jew of Malta, Marlowe has:
Let the sad presaging raven that tells
The sick man’s passport in her hollow beak,
And in the shadow of the silent night
Doth shake contagion from her sable wings.[37]
On the other hand rooks are far more lucky. In East Anglia, and indeed in many other parts of England, it bodes good fortune if rooks settle near a house,[38] for this bird always begins to build on a Sunday, and when rooks desert a rookery, it foretells the downfall of the family owning the property;[39] in some counties even they are said as a sign of grief to abandon their nests at the approach of death to the head of the family, and not to return to the ancestral domain until after the funeral at soonest. An actual instance was given of this occurrence as having happened in 1874, on the death of Sir John Walsham, at his seat, Knill Court, in Herefordshire.[40] In Cornwall rooks are believed to forsake an estate if on the death of the proprietor no heir can be found to succeed him.
