214 THE RECTORY AND ITS BIRDS 



window, or, allowing itself to be caught, would give 

 you an opportunity of observing at close quarters, 

 before you let it go, the beautiful steel blue of its 

 upper parts, its rich chestnut forehead and gorget, 

 and its little feet and legs, so ill adapted for walking 

 the one disability which Nature seems to have 

 imposed upon it and its relations the great length 

 of its wings, and its strongly forked tail. 



The nest was always placed a few feet down the 

 chimney, supported by a loose brick or an angle 

 in the brickwork ; for the swallow is by no means 

 so skilled an architect as its nearest relative the 

 house-martin. It is a rough structure, formed of 

 minute bits of clay, cemented together, partly, by 

 Nature herself, at the puddles by the roadside from 

 which the bird may be seen procuring it, partly, by 

 the sticky saliva of the bird's own mouth, and 

 strengthened by long untidy straws or bents, which 

 are often left sticking out many inches from the 

 nest. It is a genuine bit of " rough -cast," scantily 

 lined with feathers, and, unlike the martin's nest, 

 open all round. Every outhouse about the place 

 had its pair of swallows ; in particular, the coal-hole, 

 a grimy place enough, but selected, for some 

 inscrutable reason, year after year, from all the spots 

 accessible to these " birds of the sun " between 



