SAND MARTINS 295 



like great white flies against the wall of black-green 

 trees and gloomy sky beyond. 



On days when the sun shone they came in numbers 

 to perch on the telegraph wires stretched across a field 

 between the cottage and village. It was beautiful to 

 see them, a double line fifty or sixty yards long of the 

 small, pale- coloured, graceful birdlings, sitting so close 

 together as to be almost touching, all with their beaks 

 pointing to the west, from where the wind blew. 



In this same field, one day when this pleasant com- 

 pany were leaving us after a week's rest, I picked up 

 one that had killed himself by striking against the 

 wire. A most delicate little dead swallow, looking in 

 his pale colouring and softness as moth-like in death as 

 he had seemed when alive and flying. I took him 

 home the little moth-bird pilgrim to Africa, who had 

 got no farther than the Itchen on his journey and 

 buried him at the roots of a honeysuckle growing by 

 the cottage door. It seemed fittest that he should be 

 put there, to become part with the plant which, in the 

 pallid yellows and dusky reds of its blossoms, and in 

 the perfume it gives out so abundantly at eventide, has 

 an expression of melancholy, and is more to us in some 

 of our moods than any other flower. 



The bad weather brought to our little plot of ground 

 a young blackbird, who had evidently been thrown 

 upon the world too early in life. A good number of 

 blackbird broods had been brought off in the bushes 

 about us, and in the rough and tumble of those tern- 



