CONCERNING SWIFTS 161 



at last, in the clear sky, they vanished upward. 

 When would they come down ? Their nesting- 

 places were all around. Soon they would come 

 squeaking down, and rush into their accustomed 

 recesses under the tiles. But they did not. The 

 air was still. There was no sound of a bird, nor 

 sign of one. The bats were out, flitting where the 

 swifts had been. The dusk deepened into the 

 heavier shade of the summer night. And where 

 were the swifts ? Up, up, aloft ; beyond the dark 

 shadow of the horizon ; beyond the last flecks of 

 cloud ; up in the serene evening light of some vast 

 altitude. 



On the succeeding evenings I watched again, 

 and on the ipth and 2istof June saw the group of 

 swifts end their play by going up with heads to 

 the wind, almost in line, and passing clear out of 

 sight in the zenith. In the autumn of that year 

 Mr. Aubrey Edwards, of Orleton, Herefordshire, 

 recorded in Nature that -he had seen much the 

 same incidents that I have here described and at 

 an earlier date. I recorded in the Field what I 

 had seen, and nearly every year since then I have 

 mentioned the matter in that journal, with a note 

 12 



