of some swallows
against a sparrow that appropriated their nest and refused to quit.
After repeated failure to evict the intruder, the swallows, helped by
other members of the colony, calmly plastered up the front door so
effectually that the unfortunate sparrow was walled up alive and died of
hunger. This refined mode of torture is not unknown in the history of
mankind, but seems singularly unsuited to creatures so fragile.

The nests of these birds show, as a rule, little departure from the
conventional plan, but they do adapt their architecture to
circumstances, and I remember being much struck on one occasion by the
absence of any dome or roof. It was in Asia Minor, on the seashore, that
I came upon a cottage long deserted, its door hanging by one hinge, and
all the glass gone from the windows. In the empty rooms numerous
swallows were rearing twittering broods in roofless nests. No doubt the
birds realised that they had nothing to fear from rain, and were
reluctant to waste time and labour in covering their homes with
unnecessary roofs.

Most birds are careful in the education of their young, and indeed
thorough training at an early stage must be essential in the case of
creatures that are left to protect themselves and to find their own food
when only a few weeks old. Fortunately they develop with a rapidity that
puts man and other mammals to shame, and the helpless bald little swift
lying agape in the nest will in another fortnight be able to fly across
Europe. One of the most favoured observers of the early teaching given
by the mother-swallow to her brood was an angler who told me how, one
evening when he was fishing in some ponds at no great distance from
London, a number of baby swallows alighted on his rod. He kept as still
as possible, fearful of alarming his interesting visitors, but he must
at last have moved, for, with one accord, they all fell off his rod
together, skimmed over the surface of the water and disappeared in the
direction from which they had come a few moments earlier.

Swifts fly to an immense height these July evenings, mounting to such an
altitude as eventually to disappear out of sight altogether. This
curious habit, which is but imperfectly understood, has led to the
belief that, instead of roosting in the nest or among the reeds like the
swallows, the males, at any rate, spend the night flying about under the
stars. This fantastic notion is not, however, likely to commend itself
to