MOORLAND IDYLLS. 



features, though man's roads and railways 

 have largely extended his field of enterprise. 

 But the house-martin and the swallow, later 

 and far more civilized developments, have 

 learned to take advantage of our barns and 

 houses ; they nest under the eaves ; and 

 being largely water - haunters, skimming 

 lightly over the surface of ponds and lakes, 

 they have naturally taken advantage of the 

 mud at the edges as a convenient building 

 material. Last of all, the soaring swift, the 

 most absolutely aerial type of the entire 

 group, unable to alight on the ground at all, 

 has acquired the habit of catching cottony 

 seeds, and thistledown, and floating feathers 

 in his mouth as he flies, and gumming them 

 together into a mucilaginous nest with his 

 own saliva. The Oriental sea-swifts have 

 no chance of finding even such flying 

 materials among their caves and cliffs, and 

 they have consequently been driven into 

 erecting nests entirely of their own inspis- 

 sated saliva, without any basis of down or 

 174 



