rows made not the slightest movement
with their two large beaks, which, formidable and threatening, kept its
narrow entrance. The council of swallows, while a certain number of them
were succoring their companion, had continued to deliberate gravely. As
soon as all were united, the liberated prisoner included, they took
flight, and Cuvier felt convinced they had given up the field, or rather
the nest, to the robbers, who had so fraudulently possessed themselves
of it. Judge of his surprise when, in the course of a few seconds, he
beheld a cloud of two or three hundred swallows arrive, with the
rapidity of thought throw themselves before the nest, discharge at it
some mud which they had brought in their bills, and retire to give place
to another battalion, which repeated the same manoeuvre. They fired at
two or three inches from the nest, thus preventing the sparrows from
giving them any blows with their beaks. Besides, the mud, shot with such
perfidious precision, had so blinded the sparrows, after the first
discharge, that they very soon knew not in what manner to defend
themselves. Still the mud continued to thicken more and more on the
nest, whose original shape was soon obliterated: the opening would have
almost entirely disappeared, had not the sparrows, by their desperate
efforts at defense, broken away some portions of it. But the implacable
swallows, by a strategic movement, as rapidly as it was cleverly
executed, rushed upon the nest, beat down with their beaks and claws the
clay over the opening already half stopped up, and finished the attack
by hermetically closing it. Then there arose a thousand cries of
vengeance and victory. Nevertheless, the swallows ceased not the work of
destruction. They continued to carry up moistened clay till they had
built a second nest over the very opening of the besieged one. It was
raised by a hundred beaks at once, and, an hour after the execution of
the sparrows, the nest was occupied by the dispossessed swallows. The
drama was complete and terrible; the vengeance inexorable and fatal. The
unfortunate sparrows not only expiated their theft in the nest they had
taken possession of, whence they could not escape, and where suffocation
and hunger were gradually killing them, but they heard the songs of love
from the two swallows, who thus so cruelly made them wipe out the crime
of their theft. During the fight the female remained alone, languishing
and motionless, on an angle of t