nests, but snap off
the small dry twigs from the tree-tops as they fly by. Confine one of
these swifts to a room and it does not perch, but after flying till it
becomes bewildered and exhausted, it clings to the side of the wall till
it dies. Once, on returning to my room after several days' absence, I
found one in which life seemed nearly extinct; its feet grasped my
finger as I removed it from the wall, but its eyes closed, and it seemed
about on the point of joining its companion, which lay dead upon the
floor. Tossing it into the air, however, seemed to awaken its wonderful
powers of flight, and away it went straight toward the clouds. On the
wing the chimney swift looks like an athlete stripped for the race.
There is the least appearance of quill and plumage of any of our birds,
and, with all its speed and marvelous evolutions, the effect of its
flight is stiff and wiry. There appears to be but one joint in the wing,
and that next the body. This peculiar inflexible motion of the wings, as
if they were little sickles of sheet iron, seems to be owing to the
length and development of the primary quills and the smallness of the
secondary. The wing appears to hinge only at the wrist. The barn swallow
lines its rude masonry with feathers, but the swift begins life on bare
twigs, glued together by a glue of home manufacture as adhesive as
Spaulding's.

The big chimney of my cabin "Slabsides" of course attracted the chimney
swifts, and as it was not used in summer, two pairs built their nests in
it, and we had the muffled thunder of their wings at all hours of the
day and night. One night, when one of the broods was nearly fledged, the
nest that held them fell down into the fireplace. Such a din of
screeching and chattering as they instantly set up! Neither my dog nor I
could sleep. They yelled in chorus, stopping at the end of every
half-minute as if upon signal. Now they were all screeching at the top
of their voices, then a sudden, dead silence ensued. Then the din began
again, to terminate at the instant as before. If they had been long
practicing together, they could not have succeeded better. I never
before heard the cry of birds so accurately timed. After a while I got
up and put them back up the chimney, and stopped up the throat of the
flue with newspapers. The next day one of the parent birds, in bringing
food to them, came down the chimney with such force that it passed
through the papers and brought up in the