94 



FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 



SWALLOW-TIME. 



THE cave-swallows have come at last with the mid- 

 summer-time, and the hay and white clover and warm 

 winds that breathe hotly, like one that has been running 

 uphill. With the paler hawkweeds, whose edges arc so 

 delicately trimmed and cut and balanced, almost as if 

 made by deft human fingers to human design, whose 

 globes of down arc like geometrical circles built up of 

 facets, instead of by one revolution of the compasses. 

 With foxglove, and dragon-fly, and yellowing wheat ; 

 with green cones of fir, and boom of distant thunder, 

 and all things that say, 'It is summer.' Not many of 

 them even now, sometimes only two in the air together, 

 sometimes three or four, and one day eight, the very 

 greatest number a mere handful, for these eave-swallows 

 at such times should crowd the sky. The white bars 

 across their backs should be seen gliding beside the 

 dark fir copse a quarter of a mile away. They should 

 be seen everywhere, over the house, and to and fro the 

 eaves, where half last year's nest remains ; over the 

 meadows and high up in the blue ether. White breasts 

 should gleam in the azure height, appearing and disap- 

 pearing as they climb or sink, and wheel and slide 

 through those long boomerang-like flights that suddenly 

 take them a hundred yards aside. They should crowd 



