98 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 



of the turf? You must imagine it given the power to 

 rise over hedges, to make short angles about buildings, 

 slip between the trunks of trees, to avoid moving objects, 

 as men or animals, not to come in contact with other 

 animated arrows, and by some mysterious instinct to 

 know what is or what is not out of sight on the other 

 side of the wall. I was sitting on a log in the narrowest 

 of narrow lanes, a hedge at the back, in front thick fir 

 trees, whose boughs touched the ground, almost within 

 reach, the lane being nothing more than a broader foot- 

 path. It was one of those overcast days when the shelter 

 of the hedge and the furze was pleasant in July. Sud- 

 denly a swallow slid by me as it seemed underneath my 

 very hands, so close to the ground that he almost 

 travelled in the rut, the least movement on my part 

 would have stopped him. Almost before I could lift 

 my head he had reached the end of the lane and rose 

 over the gate into the road — not a moments pause 

 before he made that leap over the gate to see if there 

 was a waggon or not in the way ; a waggon-load of hay 

 would have blocked the road entirely. How did he 

 know that a man or a horse would not step into his 

 course at the instant he topped the bar ? 



A swallow never hesitates, never looks before he 

 leaps, threads all day the eyes of needles, and goes on 

 from half-past two in the morning till ten at night, with- 

 out so much as disturbing a feather. He is the perfec- 

 tion of a machine for falling. His round nest is under 

 the eaves, he throws himself out of window and begins 

 to fall, and keeps on fall, fall, for twenty hours together. 

 His head is bullet-shaped, his neck short, his body all 

 thickened up to the shoulders, tailing out to the merest 

 streak of feather. His form is like a plummet — he is 

 not unlike the heavily weighted minnow used in trolling 



