118 THE LOG OF THE SUN 



some product of man's invention serves them as 

 well as did their former wilderness home. The 

 eave swallow and barn swallow and the chimney 

 swift all belie their names in the few wild haunts 

 still uninvaded by man. The first two were origi- 

 nally cliff and bank haunters, and the latter 's 

 home was a lightning-hollowed tree. 



But the nighthawks which soar and boom above 

 our city streets, whence come they? Do they 

 make daily pilgrimages from distant woods ! The 

 city furnishes no forest floor on which they may 

 lay their eggs. Let us seek a wide expanse of flat 

 roof, high above the noisy, crowded streets. Let 

 it be one of those tar and pebble affairs, so un- 

 pleasant to walk upon, but so efficient in shedding 

 water. If we are fortunate, as we walk slowly 

 across the roof, a something, like a brownish bit 

 of wind-blown rubbish, will roll and tumble ahead 

 of us. It is a bird with a broken wing, we say. 

 How did it ever get up here! We hasten forward 

 to pick it up, when, with a last desperate flutter, 

 it topples off the edge of the roof; but instead of 

 falling helplessly to the street, the bird swings 

 out above the house-tops, on the white-barred pin- 

 ions of a nighthawk. Now mark the place where 

 first we observed the bird, and approach it care- 

 fully, crawling on hands and knees. Otherwise 

 we will very probably crush the two mottled bits 

 of shell, so exactly like pebbles in external ap- 

 pearance, but sheltering two little warm, beating 



