THE HOMECOMERS 95 



that comes back to the third beam in the cowshed 

 at California Farm, in the parish of Peace, in the 

 hundred of Comfort, Gloucestershire, England. 

 Any one who cares a rap for birds knows it to be 

 so. The flycatcher that only laid two eggs last 

 summer and only one the year before that, in the 

 broken plum tree in the Upper Orchard, has 

 probably been nesting in that tree for the last 

 twelve years. The martin that has the fancy to 

 decorate its nest with a long feather and the 

 swallow that builds in a hanging nest under the 

 eaves as though it were a martin, declare themselves 

 by their strange whims to be the same birds that 

 built in the same places last year. I knew in 

 Essex a mateless swallow that built nowhere, but 

 came and sat all day long between its flights on 

 a certain iron arch in the garden. When the 

 swallows came again next year that swallow came 

 and claimed its own perch, and resumed its 

 solitary life. It had the right to show its affection 

 thus for the gardener, for he was a humane man 

 and a great lover of the birds. If the swallow 

 came a third year it found the garden in other 

 hands, and then it must have felt that the world 

 was indeed made of sand. Perhaps it went off 

 and tried to console itself with another mate of 

 its own kind. That, at any rate, is what the 

 widower gardener had done. 



I have been round to all the known bird posts, 

 and have found thus far that, in spite of Italian 

 roccolo, the privateers of the air, and all other 



