60 MIGRATION. 



If ever I saw any thing like actual migration, it was last 

 Michaelmas-day. I was travelling, and out early in the morn- 

 ing : at first there was a vast fog, but, by the time that I was 

 got seven or eight miles from home towards the coast, the sun 

 broke out into a delicate warm day. We were then on a large 

 heath, or common, and I could discern, as the mist began to 

 break away, great numbers of swallows, hirundines rusticce, 

 clustering on the stunted shrubs and bushes, as if they had 

 roosted there all night. As soon as the air became clear and 

 pleasant, they all were on the wing at once ; and, by a placid 

 and easy flight, proceeded on southward, towards the sea : 

 after this I did not see any more flocks, only now and then a 

 straggler. 



I cannot agree with those persons that assert, that the 

 swallow kind disappear some and some, gradually, as they 

 come ; for the bulk of them seem to withdraw at once ; only 

 some stragglers stay behind a long while, and do never, there 

 is the greatest reason to believe, leave this island. Swallows 

 seem to lay themselves up, and to come forth in a warm day, 

 as bats do continually of a warm evening, after they have 

 disappeared for weeks. For a very respectable gentleman 

 assured me, that, as he was walking with some friends, under 

 Merton-wall, on a remarkably hot noon, either in the last week 

 in December, or the first week in January, he espied three or 

 four swallows huddled together on the moulding of one of the 

 windows of that college. I have frequently remarked that 

 swallows are seen later at Oxford than elsewhere : is it owing 

 to the vast, massy buildings of that place, to the many waters 

 round it, or to what else ? 



When I used to rise in a morning last autumn, and see the 

 swallows and martens clustering on the chimneys and thatch 

 of the neighbouring cottages, I could not help being touched 

 with a secret delight, mixed with some degree of mortification : 

 with delight, to observe with how much ardour and punctuality 

 those poor little birds obeyed the strong impulse towards 

 migration, or hiding, imprinted on their minds by their great 

 Creator ; and with some degree of mortification, when I 

 reflected that, after all our pains and inquiries, we are yet not 

 quite certain to what regions they do migrate ; and are still 

 farther embarrassed to find that some actually do not migrate 

 at all. 



pile, or settling on the roof. Towards midnight, they genei ally become 

 silent, unless in clear moonlight, when they are heard, with little inter- 

 mission, till morning." ED. 



