THE SWALLOW TEIBE. 343 



ornitliologists. White of Selborne mentions a pair 

 which built for two years together on the handle of 

 a pair of garden shears, which were hung up against 

 the boards of an outhouse, where the bird must 

 have had its nest . disturbed whenever that imple- 

 ment was wanted; while another built on the wings 

 of the body of an owl which happened to hang 

 dead from the rafter of a barn. " In the summer 

 of 1830," says a wi'iter in Loudon's Magazine of 

 Natural History, '' a pair of swallows commenced 

 their nest upon the crank of a bell- wire in the 

 passage of a farm-house at Crux Easton ; the one 

 end of which opened into a little garden, the other 

 into the kitchen, and the door of which towards 

 the garden was usually left open. The passage 

 was fifteen or eighteen feet in length, and the bell- 

 wire nearly at the extremity, towards the kitchen. 

 The farmer and his wife were so much pleased 

 with the sociability and confidence of their new 

 inmates, that they not only allowed their new 

 domicile to remain unmolested, but were par- 

 ticularly careful that free ingress and egress should 

 be always afibrded through the garden door. The 

 nest was completed, and a brood of young swal- 

 lows reared, which took wing. 



