154 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



After so much labour is bestowed in erecting a mansion, as 

 nature seldom works in vain, martins will breed on for several 

 years together in the same nest, where it happens to be well 

 sheltered and secure from the injuries of weather. The shell or 

 crust of the nest is a sort of rustic-work full of knobs and pro- 

 tuberances on the outside : nor is the inside of those that I have 

 examined smoothed with any exactness at all ; but is rendered 

 soft and warm, and fit for incubation, by a lining of small straws, 

 grasses, and feathers ; and sometimes by a bed of moss interwoven 

 with wool. In this nest they tread, or engender, frequently 

 during the time of building ; and the hen lays from three to five 

 white eggs. 



At first when the young are hatched, and are in a naked and 

 helpless condition, the parent birds, with tender assiduity, carry 

 out what comes away from their young. Was it not for this 

 affectionate cleanliness the nestlings would soon be burnt up, 

 and destroyed in so deep and hollow a nest, by their own caustic 

 excrement. In the quadruped creation the same neat precaution 

 is made use of; particularly among dogs and cats, where the 

 dams lick away what proceeds from their young. But in birds 

 there seems to be a particular provision, that the dung of nest- 

 lings is enveloped in a tough kind of jelly, and therefore is the 

 easier conveyed off without soiling or daubing.* Yet, as nature 

 is cleanly in all her ways, the young perform this office for them- 

 selves in a little time by thrusting their tails out at the aperture 

 of their nest. As the young of small birds presently arrive at 

 their rjXucia, or full growth, they soon become impatient of con- 

 finement, and sit all day with their heads out at the orifice, 

 where the dams, by clinging to the nest, supply them with food 

 from morning to night. For a time the young are fed on the 

 wing by their parents ; but the feat is done by so quick and al- 

 most imperceptible a slight, that a person must have attended 

 very exactly to their motions before he would be able to perceive 

 it. As soon as the young are able to shift for themselves the 

 dams immediately turn their thoughts to the business of a second 

 brood : while the first flight, shaken off and rejected by their 



able authority, of eave swallows (or " martins") congregating to the assistance of the injured 

 pair, and immuring the sitting sparrow in its usurped abode. Generally speaking, however, the 

 sparrow contrives to maintain possession comparatively unmolested. ED. 



* This envelope appears to be somehow occasioned by the still quiet life which is led. by nest- 

 lings. An adult haw-grosbeak, which I kept for some time in confinement, having broken his 

 leg, which prevented him from getting about, his routings were in consequence encased like 

 those of a young bird. En. 



