THE PROCESSION PASSES 91 
never of a Dirt Swallow. Please describe it to me,” 
said Gray Lady, looking interested. 
Tommy hesitated for a minute, for it is one thing to 
know a bird by sight, but quite another to carry a correct 
picture of it in your mind’s eye and then put it into 
words. 
‘A Dirt Swallow is pretty small and a kind of a dirty 
colour on top and a stripe across his chest, the rest white, 
and his tail hasn’t sharp points, and he isn’t blue and 
shiny like a Barn Swallow. He doesn’t build a nice nest 
like the others, but bores a hole right into a dirt bank, 
ever so far in, like a Kingfisher does, just like he was a 
ground-hog, and puts feathers in at the end for a nest. 
That’s why we call ’em Dirt Swallows. There’s a bank 
above Uncle Hill’s gravel-pit that’s full of the holes, and 
another bank full right at Farm’s End above the sand 
beach where we camped a week last summer. The way 
I found out about the holes was by diggin’ down a piece 
back of the edge of the bank, for sometimes they bore 
as much as four feet. The eggs are real white, not 
spotted like Barn Swallows’, ’cause we found a couple of 
bad ones, that hadn’t hatched, among the feathers.” 
Here Tommy paused for breath, his face all aglow 
with eagerness. 
“That,” said Gray Lady, ‘is a very good and clear 
description of the Bank Swallow, which is the English 
name that the Wise Men have given the little bird that you 
call the Dirt Swallow. As the bird always burrows its 
nesting hole in a bank and never in field earth or the flat 
ground as a woodchuck does, Bank Swallow is decidedly 
the better name.” 
