62 BIRD STORIES FROM BURROUGHS 



dies. Once, on returning to my room after several 

 days' absence, I found one in which life seemed 

 nearly extinct ; its feet grasped my finger as I 

 removed it from the wall, but its eyes closed, and 

 it seemed about on the point of joining its com- 

 panion, which lay dead upon the floor. Tossing it 

 into the air, however, seemed to awaken its won- 

 derful powers of flight, and away it went straight 

 toward the clouds. On the wing the chimney 

 swift looks like an athlete stripped for the race. 

 There is the least appearance of quill and plu- 

 mage of any of our birds, and, with all its speed 

 and marvelous evolutions, the effect of its flight 

 is stiff and wiry. There appears to be but one 

 joint in the wing, and that next the body. This 

 peculiar inflexible motion of the wings, as if they 

 were little sickles of sheet iron, seems to be 

 owing to the length and development of the pri- 

 mary quills and the smallness of the secondary. 

 The wing appears to hinge only at the wrist. 

 The barn swallow lines its rude masonry with 

 feathers, but the swift begins life on bare twigs, 

 glued together by a glue of home manufacture 

 as adhesive as Spaulding's. 



The big chimney of my cabin "Slabsides" of 

 course attracted the chimney swifts, and as it was 

 not used in summer, two pairs built their nests 

 in it, and we had the muffled thunder of their 



