unlike those of the ChipjjinK Sparrcjw. So close is the resemblance that one \a 

 almost sure to be dcceivetl by them the first time ; but closer attention discloses 

 their more rapid utterance and somewhat finer quality. One individual heard near 

 Sugar Grove wound up his trill with an odd musical quirk quite out of character, 

 and which he had borrowed, 1 faiuy, from a Hooded Warbler nesting near. 



Communion 



By Meliccnt Eno Hiimason 



< 'ne afternoon, as 1 was returning through a meadow, after tramping in 

 the mountains, I spied, sitting on the barbed wire fence directly before me, five 

 baby barn swallows. 



Why must we insist upon calling these beautiful creatures of salmon and 

 blue, such a raw, uncouth appellation ? 



They were all looking straight at me, but did not attempt to fly, though 

 surely old enough. 



I was reflecting upon their hesitancy, when, through the mellow glow of 

 an hour before twilight, I beheld the mother dart down from the sky with food 

 for her babies. 



She swooped to the first and fed him : then to the second and fed him ; 

 then to the third, but just here she noticed me, and with anxious little cries 

 and excited whistles of warning, she scurried those youngsters from the fence, to 

 the nursery of the sky as fast as they could plane the air. 



I have always wondered if the other three babies were fed as much as the 

 rest that day, or if they were all mixed up, in the eyes of the mother, as soon as 

 they felt the fence. 



A simple little incident, this, but it left a strange impression upon me. 



In that beautiful, late afternoon glow, much like the reflection cast from 

 stained glass windows in a cathedral — though, somehow, I prefer to vision the in- 

 terior of a little Episcopal chapel — the parent swallow appeared to me like a rector 

 in vesture of the sacred blue ; the little swallows represented his flock ; while the 

 hour of feeding merged into the holy hour of communion. 



I think I, too. would have knelt before that beautiful creature, if she had not 

 swept away, with her brood, to the sky. 



871 



