ght of a black hole.

And its favorite home is down a chimney.

54. Not for your hearth's sake, nor for your company's. Do not think
it. The bird will love you if you treat it kindly; is as frank and
friendly as bird can be; but it does not, more than others, seek your
society. It comes to your house because in no wild wood, nor rough
rock, can it find a cavity close enough to please it. It comes for the
blessedness of imprisonment, and the solemnity of an unbroken and
constant shadow, in the tower, or under the eaves.

Do you suppose that this is part of its necessary economy, and that a
swallow could not catch flies unless it lived in a hole?

Not so. This instinct is part of its brotherhood with another race of
creatures. It is given to complete a mesh in the reticulation of the
orders of life.

55. I have already given you several reasons for my wish that you
should retain, in classifying birds, the now rejected order of Picae. I
am going to read you a passage from Humboldt, which shows you what
difficulties one may get into for want of it.

You will find in the second volume of his personal narrative, an
account of the cave of Caripe in New Andalusia, which is inhabited by
entirely nocturnal birds, having the gaping mouths of the goat-sucker
and the swallow, and yet feeding on fruit.

Unless, which Mr. Humboldt does not tell us, they sit under the trees
outside, in the night time, and hold their mouths open, for the berries
to drop into, there is not the smallest occasion for their having wide
mouths, like swallows. Still less is there any need, since they are
fruit eaters, for their living in a cavern 1,500 feet out of daylight.
They have only, in consequence, the trouble of carrying in the seeds to
feed their young, and the floor of the cave is thus covered, by the
seeds they let fall, with a growth of unfortunate pale plants, which
have never seen day. Nay, they are not even content with the darkness
of their cave; but build their nests in the funnels with which the roof
of the grotto is pierced like a sieve; live actually in the chimney,
not of a house, but of an Egyptian sepulcher! The color of this bird,
of so remarkable taste in lodging, Humboldt tells us, is "of dark
bluish-gray, mixed with streaks and specks of black. Large white spots,
which have the form of a heart, and which are bordered with black, mark
the head, the wings, and the tail. The spread of the wings, which are
composed of seventeen