_Fifth Son._--What is the superstition relating to a fifth son? I should be glad of any illustrations of it. There certainly are instances in which the fifth son has been the most distinguished scion of the family.
_Cwn Wybir, or Cwn Annwn_--_Curlews_ (No. 19. p. 294).--The late ingenious and well-informed Mr. William Weston Young, then residing in Glamorgan, gave me the following exposition of these mysterious _Dogs of the Sky_, or _Dogs of the Abyss_, whose aërial cries at first perplexed as well as startled him. He was in the habit of traversing wild tracts of country, in his profession of land surveyor and often rode by night. One intensely dark night he was crossing a desolate range of hills, when he heard a most diabolical yelping and shrieking in the air, horrible enough in such a region and at black midnight. He was not, however, a superstitious man, and, being an observant naturalist, had paid great attention to the notes of birds, and the remarkable variations between the day and night notes of the same species. He suspected these strange unearthly sounds to be made by some gregarious birds on the wing; but { 483} the darkness was impenetrable, and he gazed upwards in vain. The noises, meanwhile, were precisely those which he had heard ascribed to the _Cwn Wybir_, and would have been truly appalling to a superstitious imagination. His quick ear at length caught the rush of pinions, and, in a short time, a large flight of curlews came sweeping down to the heather, so near his head, that some of their wings brushed his hat. They were no sooner settled, than the _Cwn Wybir_ ceased to be heard. Mr. Young then recollected having noticed similar nocturnal cries from the curlew, but had never before encountered such a formidable flying legion of those birds, screaming in a great variety of keys, amidst mountain echoes.
An erroneous date, resting on such authorities as Mr. Hallam and Mr. J. Payne Collier, deserves a note. The former in his _Const. Hist._ (ii. 275. note, second edition), and the latter in the _Egerton Papers_, printed for the Camden Society (p. 446.), assigns the date 1614 to the death of Bartholomew Legate at Smithfield. The latter also gives the date March 13. Now the true date is March 18, 1611-12, as will appear by consulting--1. The commissions and warrants for the burning of Legate and Wightman, inserted in _Truth brought to Light, or the Narrative History of King James for the first Fourteen Years_, 4to. 1651; 2. Chamberlain's _Letters to Sir Dudley Carleton_, dated Feb. 26, 1611 (1611-12), and March 25, 1612, printed in _The Court and Times of James I._, vol. i. pp. 136. 164.; and 3. Wallace's _Antitrinitarian Biography_, vol. ii. p. 534. Fuller, in his _Church History_, gives the correct date, and states that his "burning of heretics much startled common people;" "wherefore King James politicly preferred that heretics hereafter, though condemned, should silently and privately waste themselves away in the prison."