282 NATURAL HISTORY 



LETTER XXII. 



TO THE SAME. 

 DEAR SIR, SELBORNE, Sept. 13, 1774. 



BY means of a straight cottage chimney I had an op- 

 portunity this summer of remarking, at my leisure, how 

 swallows ascend and descend through the shaft: but 

 my pleasure in contemplating the address with which 

 this feat was performed to a considerable depth in the 



time, it made a singular singing noise at night when the candles were lit, 

 though covered over with a sheet of paper. The noise was like the chirp- 

 ing of a cricket, or rather like the singing of a teakettle. I cannot doubt 

 that the old ones do likewise by night. 



Finding its scrambling about the room inconvenient, I made it an en- 

 closure in the embrasure of one of the windows, where some sheets of 

 paper had been spread to prevent its dirtying the room, and which I 

 fenced in by a row of quarto books. It lived in general in a small square 

 box which had something soft at the bottom for it to lie upon, and two op- 

 posite apertures near the top which accommodated its head and tail. The 

 bottom of the apertures was two inches and a half from the ground, and 

 it showed some skill in climbing into the box, which it did by means of 

 its bill, using it like a parrot 



After I had had it a week I tried to practise it in flying; it could not, 

 unless lifted, rise many inches above the carpet, but it improved gra- 

 dually. During the first week it appeared to take very little notice of 

 me, seizing the victuals offered to it at the point of a quill as if mechani- 

 cally with a sudden snap of the bill ; but after that time it began to look 

 up to me for food, when I approached : when hungry it descended from 

 the box in which it was usually placed, and began scrambling about its 

 enclosure, giving no notice of its wants but by the rustling of the paper 

 as it moved. I judged from this that its parents had probably been shot, 

 and that hunger made it quit the nest : when I had had it ten days, if 

 tossed up gently it could fly once round the room and then dropped, but 

 it could not surmount the quarto volumes by which it was penned in. It 

 could however climb well up the wires of a cage, and would cling fast to 

 them. On the last day of July it flew three times round the room before 

 it fell, but the next day it did not succeed so well. 



It seemed now to listen when the swifts out of doors were screaming, 

 and tried much to get out of its bounds by climbing up on the plinth, and 

 trying from thence to get over the books, which it effected once. On the 

 4th of August in the evening I thought of taking it down into a large 

 level pasture and practising it in flying there, for the swifts had not many 



