120 A DAY ON THE LEA 



Samuel Pepys ever foregathered. Can any 

 reader tell me ? I was by chance reading Pepys 

 the other day when I came upon this passage : 



" Swallows are often brought in these nets out 

 of the mudd, from under water, hanging together 

 or others dead in ropes, and brought to the fire 

 will come to life." Pepys* Diary, Dec. nth, 

 1663. 



Izaak Walton says : 



" It is well known that swallowes, which are 

 not seen to flye in England for six months in 

 the year, but about Michaelmas leave us for a 

 hotter climate; yet some of them that have 

 been left behind their fellows have been found 

 (many thousand at a time) in hollow trees, 

 where they have been observed to live and sleep 

 out the whole winter without meat." 



One might easily fancy they had talked it over. 



Gilbert White, a hundred years later, does 

 not contradict this theory of the hibernation of 

 swallows. 1 



It struck me as at least curious that these 

 three very remarkable men should roundly assert 



1 Mr. Grant Allen, in his edition of "White's Sel- 

 borne," says that "White could never quite get over the 

 belief in hibernation, a point to which he recurs again 

 and again throughout these letters. " 



