his assistants with their bills. It is curious enough that the
miraculous education of these birds makes its appearance in a Scottish
legal or official document at the close of the fifteenth century. It is
an instrument recording an attestation to the enormous value of the down
of these renowned birds; and seems, indeed, to be an advertisement or
puff by merchants dealing in the ware, though its ponderous Latinity is
in curious contrast with the neat examples of that kind of literature to
which we are accustomed in these days.[82]

[Footnote 82: "Instrumentum super Aucis Sancti Cuthberti."--Spalding
Club.]

One of the prettiest of the stories about birds is divided between St
Serf, the founder of a monastery in Loch Leven, and St Kentigern, the
patron of Glasgow, where he is better known as St Mungo. Kentigern was
one among a parcel of neophyte boys whom the worthy old Serf, or
Servanus, was perfecting in the knowledge of the truth. Their teacher
had a feathered pet--"quaedam avicula quae vulgo ob ruborem corpusculi
rubisca nuncupatur"--a robin-redbreast, in fact, an animal whose good
fortune it is never to be mentioned without some kindly reference to his
universal popularity, and the decoration which renders him so easily
recognised wherever he appears. St Serf's robin was a wonderful bird; he
not only took food from his master's hand and pecked about him according
to the fashion of tame and familiar birds, but took a lively interest in
his devotions and studies by flapping his wings and crowing in his own
little way, so as to be a sort of chorus to the acts of the saint. The
old man enjoyed this extremely; and his biographer, with more geniality
than hagiographers usually show, sympathises with this innocent
recreation, applying the example of the bow that was not always bent, in
a manner suggestive of suspicions that he was not entirely unacquainted
with profane letters. One day, when the saint had retired to his
devotions, the boys amused themselves with his little pet; and a
struggle arising among them for its possession, the head was torn from
the body--altogether a natural incident. Thereupon, says the narrator,
fear was turned to grief, and the avenging birch--"plagas virgarum quae
puerorum gravissima tormenta esse solent"--arose terribly in their
sight. It was at this moment that an unpopular pupil, named Kentigern--a
new boy, apparently--a stranger who had not taken in good-fellowship to
the rest of the sch