NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 159 



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 almost imperceptible a flight 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 nurses, congregate in great flocks, and are the 

 birds that are seen clustering and hovering on sunny mornings and 

 evenings round towers and steeples, and on the roofs of churches 

 and houses. These congregatings usually begin to take place 

 about the first week in August ; and therefore we may conclude 

 that by that time the first flight is pretty well over. The young 

 of this species do not quit their abodes altogether ; but the more 

 forward birds get abroad some days before the rest. These 

 approaching the eaves of buildings, and playing about before them, 

 make people think that several old ones attend one nest. They 

 are often capricious in fixing on a nesting-place, beginning many 

 edifices, and leaving them unfinished ; but when once a nest is 

 completed in a sheltered place, it serves for several seasons. 

 Those which breed in a ready-finished house get the start in 

 hatching of those that build new by ten days or a fortnight. 

 These industrious artificers are at their labours in the long days 

 before four in the morning. When they fix their materials they 

 plaster them on with their chins, moving their heads with a quick 

 vibratory motion, They dip and wash as they fly sometimes in 

 very hot weather, but not so frequently as swallows. It has been 

 observed that martins usually build to a north-east or north-west 

 aspect, that the heat of the sun may not crack and destroy their 

 nests ; but instances are also remembered where they bred for 

 many years in vast abundance in a hot stifled inn-yard against a 

 wall facing to the south. 



Birds in general are wise in their choice of situation ; but in this 

 neighbourhood every summer is seen a strong proof to the contrary 

 at an house without eaves in an exposed district, where some 

 martins build year by year in the corners of the windows. But, as 

 the corners of these windows (which face to the south-east and 

 south-west) are too shallow, the nests are washed down every hard 

 rain ; and yet these birds drudge on to no purpose from summer to 

 summer, without changing their aspect or house. It is a piteous 



