This
superstition has found expression in the Scotch proverb: "Whistling
maids and crowing hens are no canny about a house."
Seeing magpies before breakfast was a good or bad omen according to the
number seen up to four. This was expressed in the following rhyme, which
varies slightly in different localities. The following version was
current in my native village:--
"One bodes grief, two's a death,
Three's a wedding, four's a birth."
Chambers in his Scottish Rhymes has it thus:--
"One's joy, two's grief.
Three's a wedding, four's a birth."
I knew a man who, if on going to his work he had seen two _piets_
together, would have refrained from working before he had taken
breakfast, believing that if he did so it would result in evil either to
himself or his family.
If a cock crew in the morning with its head in at the door of the house,
it was a token that a stranger would pay the family a visit that day;
and so firm was the _faith_ in this that it was often followed by works,
the house being _redd_ up for the occasion.
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