MASONRY OF THE CRESCENT SWALLOW 431 



in the West, as compared with their rather sporadic distribu- 

 tion in the East, is thus readily explained. The great veins of 

 the West the Missouri, the Columbia, and the Colorado, 

 and most of their venous tributaries, returning the humors 

 from the clouds to their home in the sea, are supplied in pro- 

 fusion with animated congregations of the Swallows, often 

 vastly more extensive than those gatherings of the feathered 

 Sons of Temperance beneath our eaves, where the sign of the 

 order, a bottle, neck downward, is set for our edification. 



All are familiar, doubtless, with the architecture of these 

 masons if any be not. the books will remove their ignorance. 

 But there are many interesting details, perhaps insufficiently 

 elucidated in our standard treatises. It is generally under- 

 stood that the most perfect nest, that is, a nest fully finished 

 and furnished with a neck, resembling a decanter tilted over, 

 that such a " bottle-nosed " or " retort-shaped " nest, is the 

 typical one, indicating the primitive fashion of building. But 

 I am by no means satisfied of this. Eemembering that the 

 Swallows are all natural hole-breeders, we may infer that their 

 early order of architecture was a wall, rampart, or breastwork, 

 which defended and perhaps enlarged a natural cavity on 

 the face of a cliff. Traces of such work are still evident 

 enough in those frequent instances in which they take a hole 

 in a wall, such as one left by a missing brick, and cover it in 

 eicher with a regular domed vestibule or a mere cup-like rim 

 of mud. It was probably not until they had served a long 

 apprenticeship that they acquired the sufficient skill to stick a 

 nest against a perfectly smooth, vertical support. Some kind 

 of domed nest was still requisite, to carry out the idea of hole- 

 breeding, a trait so thoroughly ingrained in Hirundine nature, 

 and implying perfect covering for the eggs; and the indication 

 is fully met in one of the very commonest forms of nest, 

 namely, a hemispherical affair, quite a " breastwork" in fact, 

 with a hole at the most protuberant part, or just below it. The 

 running on of a neck to the nest, as seen in those nests we 

 consider the most elaborate, seems to merely represent a sur- 

 plusage of building energy, like that which induces a House 

 Wren, for example, to accumulate a preposterous quantity of 

 trash in its cubby-holes. Such architecture reminds me of the 

 Irishman's notion of how cannon are made by taking a hole 

 and pouring the melted metal around it. It is the rule, when 

 the nest is built in any exposed situation. But since the Swal- 



