210 SOME COMMON LAND-.BIRDS. 



These calamities were so frequent that the swallows began 

 to consider. They liked their new quarters too well to re- 

 turn to nesting against cliffs. On the whole, men were good 

 to them, flies were abundant, and it was warmer here than in 

 the wilderness. So they remained ; and they took the sensible 

 way of remedying their distresses. They began to remodel 

 their nests. The first thing to do was to diminish the weight. 

 They cut away the long, bottle-nosed entrance, and they 

 altered the shape of the body of the nest. Its greatest length 

 had been perpendicular to the side of the barn, so that gravity 

 tended to drag it off ; now they made the greatest length par- 

 allel with the barn, thus exposing the structure less to the pull 

 of gravity, and giving a greater surface of attachment. No 

 roof was needed now, for the eaves formed that. No en- 

 trance passage was needed, and that was sacrificed. The 

 eaves-swallow's nest had been perfectly adapted to its new 

 conditions. 



And yet there arose circumstances wherein the new house 

 was not an entire success. Once, on a trip in the Maine woods, 

 we came to a farm ten miles from the nearest house and about 

 thirty from the nearest town. It was kept up to raise hay 

 for the lumbermen's horses in winter, and had a fine new barn, 

 with the eaves finished out at right angles to the sides. Here 

 a colony of swallows had built their nests, and to my surprise 

 they were the old-fashioned, bottle-nosed structures that civil- 

 ized swallows had abandoned forty years before. There are 

 two possible explanations of this. Perhaps these backwoods 

 swallows had never learned to alter their nests ; perhaps, 

 as they were outside the limits of civilization, they held old- 

 fogy notions of letting well enough alone, or perhaps they 

 had some method in their work. 



This barn was painted, very smoothly finished, and much 



