s them as well as did their
former wilderness home. The eave swallow and barn swallow and the chimney
swift all belie their names in the few wild haunts still uninvaded by man.
The first two were originally cliff and bank haunters, and the latter's
home was a lightning-hollowed tree.

But the nighthawks which soar and boom above our city streets, whence come
they? Do they make daily pilgrimages from distant woods? The city
furnishes no forest floor on which they may lay their eggs. Let us seek a
wide expanse of flat roof, high above the noisy, crowded streets. Let it
be one of those tar and pebble affairs, so unpleasant to walk upon, but so
efficient in shedding water. If we are fortunate, as we walk slowly across
the roof, a something, like a brownish bit of wind-blown rubbish, will
roll and tumble ahead of us. It is a bird with a broken wing, we say. How
did it ever get up here? We hasten forward to pick it up, when, with a
last desperate flutter, it topples off the edge of the roof; but instead
of falling helplessly to the street, the bird swings out above the
house-tops, on the white-barred pinions of a nighthawk. Now mark the place
where first we observed the bird, and approach it carefully, crawling on
hands and knees. Otherwise we will very probably crush the two mottled
bits of shell, so exactly like pebbles in external appearance, but
sheltering two little warm, beating hearts. Soon the shells will crack,
and the young nighthawks will emerge,--tiny fluffs,--in colour the very
essence of the scattered pebbles.

In the autumn they will all pass southward to the far distant tropics, and
when spring again awakens, the instinct of migration will lead them, not
to some mottled carpet of moss and rocks deep in the woods, but to the
tarred roof of a house in the very heart of a great city.

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JUNE

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THE GALA DAYS OF BIRDS

Migration is over, and the great influx of birds which last month filled
every tree and bush is now distributed over field and wood, from our
dooryard and lintel vine to the furthermost limits of northern
exploration; birds, perhaps, having discovered the pole long years ago.
Now every feather and plume is at its brightest and full development; for
must not the fastidious females be sought and won?

And now the great struggle of the year is a