UNDER THE MAPLES 



color, its hues yet lack the intensity, and its flight 

 the swiftness, of those of its brother of the hay- 

 lofts. The tree swallows and the bank swallows 

 are pleasing, but they are much more local and 

 restricted in their ranges than the barn-frequenters. 

 As a farm boy I did not know them at all, but the 

 barn swallows the summer always brought. 



After all, there is but one swallow; the others 

 are particular kinds that we specify. How curious 

 that men should ever have got the notion that this 

 airy, fairy creature, this playmate of the sun- 

 beams, spends the winter hibernating in the mud of 

 ponds and marshes, the bedfellow of newts and 

 frogs and turtles ! It is an Old- World legend, born 

 of the blindness and superstition of earlier times. 

 One knows that the rain of the rainbow may be 

 gathered at one's feet in a mud-puddle, but the 

 fleeting spectrum of the bow is not a thing of life. 

 Yet one would as soon think of digging up a rain- 

 bow in the mud as a swallow. The swallow follows 

 the sun, and in August is off for the equatorial 

 regions, where it hibernates on the wing, buried 

 in tropical sunshine. 



Well, this brilliant day is a good day for the 

 swallows, a good day for the haymakers, and a good 

 day for him who sits before his open barn door and 

 weaves his facts and midsummer fancies into this 

 slight literary fabric. 



