x.] 



OF SELBORNE. 



29 



September the twenty-ninth ; and yet they totally disappeared 

 with us by the fifth of October. How strange it is that the 

 swift, which seems to live exactly the same life with the 

 swallow and house-martin, should leave us before the middle 

 of August invariably ' while the latter stay often till the middle 

 of October ; once I even saw numbers of house-martins on the 

 seventh of November. The martins, redwings, and fieldfares 



THE SWALLOW. 



were flying in sight together ; an uncommon assemblage of 

 summer and winter birds ! 



[It is not easy to discover whether White really believed in 

 the hibernation of swallows or not ; he clings to the idea, and 

 returns to it, although his own arguments seem to refute the 

 notion almost as completely as those of any recent author. 

 Writing twenty years later than the date of this letter, he tells 

 us, in his Observations on Nature, March 23, 1788, that a gen- 

 tleman who was this week on a visit at Waverly, took the oppor- 

 tunity of examining some of the holes in the sand-bank with which 



