188 THE RECTORY AND ITS BIRDS 



March, to dig out, with perfect impunity, deep 

 holes for themselves, which, later in the year, were 

 occupied by other birds. In the chimneys, as well 

 as in the many outbuildings, the swallows reared 

 their twittering young. The house-martins moulded, 

 with all a plasterer's skill, their architectural nests 

 on the garden side of the house, where a wooden 

 boarding beneath the thatch formed the eave ; and, 

 last and best of all, the swifts, those most summer- 

 like of all summer birds, almost the last to arrive, 

 and quite the first to depart of all our summer 

 visitants, and speaking only of the longest and 

 brightest days and the shortest and most balmy of 

 nights, returned thither, year after year, with unvary- 

 ing fidelity and in almost exactly equal numbers, 

 from the far Soudan, or perhaps the still farther 

 Madagascar or the Cape, and reared their young 

 in exactly the same holes in which they and their 

 ancestors had been reared before them. These and 

 other birds it was mine to welcome and to watch, 

 from very early years, in my home and their home, 

 till they seemed to have become almost a part of 

 the home itself. I could hardly have conceived of 

 the Rectory without them or of them without the 

 Rectory ; and, had I heard it in those early years, 

 could have echoed, or perhaps rather have reversed, 



