A BIRD MYSTIC 



EVERY year the ragtailed swallows are 

 fewer, for many are destroyed as the hosts 

 sweep southward in autumn, killed by 

 electric wires on the Continent " for food " 

 (I have seen them, with thrushes and 

 blackbirds, laid out, pitifully small and 

 gentle, in the Italian shop-windows Nero 

 in hell must be awfully pleased with 

 this sure sign of degeneracy among the 

 descendants of that race of which he 

 declared himself to be "a genius.") 



In all the tallats 1 of my Devon village 

 there were but four swallows' nests during 

 the summer of 1921. There are over fifty 

 tallats. Under the rafters are the ruins of 

 nearly two hundred mud mansions belong- 

 ing to past summers. Some, indeed, are 

 intact, others utilised by flycatchers, others 



1 The loft over a shippen, or open catle-shed. 

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