202 SOME COMMON LAND-BIRDS. 



Ohio, and in 1819 at Newport, Kentucky; by Major Long 

 and Sir John Franklin, who observed them the next year, 

 one in the Rocky Mountains, the other in British America. 

 All these early mentions are from the West and very far west 

 for those days. 



But, after the Revolutionary War, the country began to 

 grow. Farms spread out and met each other, while the forests 

 vanished. The swallow, soaring overhead, could see new open 

 spaces to the East, new nesting-places in a region full of 

 better cliffs than he had known, and, what was more, full of 

 strange, square artificial cliffs that were hollow inside, and 

 filled with men and children and cattle, and surrounded by 

 house-flies. The abundance of food was an attraction. Houses 

 and barns were a new experience to our wild Western swal- 

 lows; but they came trustingly, and plastered their cradles 

 up under the eaves of the new barns in the clearings, as much 

 at home as if they had always been civilized. Every year 

 the farms grew and the swallows spread along the line of' 

 them to the East, where houses and barns were still more 

 numerous, where hawks seldom dared molest them, and where 

 flies were abundant. By the middle of the present century 

 they were established in all the New England states as com- 

 mon residents. 



Though so numerous where they are found at all, the swal- 

 lows are very irregular in their distribution. We may find 

 several species in one town, and but one or two in a neighbor- 

 ing village, or we may find large tracts almost unvisited by 

 swallows. The causes for this are various. A great storm 

 has been known to kill nearly all the swallows resident in 

 certain places as a few years since a storm, annihilated the 

 purple martins of Cambridge, Massachusetts. It may -be years 

 before a region thus depopulated will be stocked again, since the 



