214 SOME COMMON LAND-BIRDS. 



each of which a pair of martins or blue-backed swallows 

 nested. Indeed, were it not for its inaccessibility, we should 

 call this a swallow hotel instead of a swallow castle. 



How these martin houses came to be so generally built, 

 especially in scattered farming sections, it is hard to say. 

 Perhaps the early settlers had some real fondness for the 

 pretty, social bird ; perhaps they were reminded in him of 

 the old country over the sea ; but quite as likely, in their 

 sensible, unsentimental way, they encouraged him as a protec- 

 tor to their chickens. There was a time, with the woods 

 creeping up to the edge of every farm, when crows and hawks 

 were far bolder and more troublesome than to-day, and when 

 a colony of martins not only gave the chickens a cry of danger 

 which they understood, and brought out the farmer with 

 his gun, but joined battle themselves, and held the thief 

 and assassin from his plundering by their furious assaults. 

 The farmer of the old times was not particularly intelligent 

 or sentimental or merciful ; he neither knew nor cared what a 

 bird ate so long as it did not eat anything he could sell ; he was 

 not the least grateful to the martin for destroying insects, and 

 he tolerated no bird or beast that " wasn't some good." If he 

 encouraged the martin, the chances are that he was merely 

 retaining him as a sky watchman on his chickens. The lazy 

 dog got no bone of charity in the old-time farm-house, and the 

 martin paid his rent, no doubt, in hard work. But for some 

 reason he had a house provided for him. 



It was always a glad sound in the spring to hear the martins 

 coming back with loud chirps of joy as they saw at a distance 

 and recognized their old home. " There it is ! Don't you see 

 it ? Oh, hurry, hurry up ! " they called to each other, and 

 swift and straight as a flight of cross-bow bolts they sped to 

 it. All the rest of the day they would sit about their door- 



