PERCHING BIRDS. 163 
well fit them for walking, and I never saw one make 
more than two or perhaps three steps without using its 
wings. As soon as the young ones can fly they 
are in the habit of resting all together on the branch 
of a tree, generally choosing a withered one, and here 
the parent bird feeds them as she passes on the wing. 
The swallow is very vigilant to detect the presence of 
any bird of prey; one or two wild hurried shrieks are 
uttered by the first who becomes aware of the danger, 
the call to arms is immediately obeyed, and in a few 
seconds all within hearing of the note of alarm are 
gathered together, and fly wildly about their enemy. 
The cuckoo is pursued in this way quite as much as any 
of the hawks, 
How strange it is that the idea that swallows wintered 
in the mud at the bottom of ponds and rivers should 
ever have been a matter of belief with intelligent and 
scientific men, and have been so long and pertinaciously 
held; and stranger still that in this boasted age of 
enlightenment the wild story seems to be yet believed. 
Only last year I met with a paragraph in a serial circu- 
lating entirely amongst the educated classes, which 
stated this as a fact about which there were not two 
opinions. I opened my eyes in astonishment to read 
such information as the following :—“In Sweden the 
swallows, as soon as the winter begins to approach, 
plunge themselves into the lakes, where they remain 
asleep and hide under the ice till the return of the sum- 
mer, when revived by the new warmth, they come out 
and fly away as formerly. While the lakes are frozen, 
if somebody will break the ice in those parts where it 
appears darker than the rest, he will find masses of 
swallows—cold, asleep, and half dead ; which, by taking 
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