42 SWALLOWS. 



hour, finding that they were rather rudely handled, 

 all of them recovered, so as to fly impatiently round 

 the room, in search of some opening, by which they 

 might escape. The window was thrown up, and 

 they soon found their way into the fields, and were 

 never seen again. 



A similar circumstance, though, from the place of 

 its discovery, it must refer probably to Sand-Martins, 

 was related by a gentleman, who found two Swallows 

 in a sand-bank at Newton, near Stirling, quite 

 dormant. 



Again at Belleville, in North America, a gentle- 

 man observed one evening, a little after sun-set, late 

 in the Autumn, a vast number of Swallows collected 

 together, high in the air, and hovering over a par- 

 ticular spot. Having been informed by one of his 

 school-fellows, when a boy, that Swallows had been 

 seen to dive into a mill-pond and disappear, he de- 

 termined to watch these, and in about ten or fifteen 

 minutes, as darkness came on, they lowered their 

 flight, and gathered themselves into a smaller circle, 

 and at length poured down into a very large hollow 

 sycamore tree. It was observed that they came out 

 for several successive days, and returned in the 

 evening in the same manner. In the following year 

 the tree was cut down, the hollow was then found 

 to be about six feet in diameter, and filled, six inches 

 deep, with bones, feathers, arid other remains of dead 

 birds, such, probably, as were too old, or too feeble 

 to fly out in the Spring. They apparently must have 

 occupied the tree for several years. Two other trees 

 were subsequently seen, fallen, with similar appear- 

 ances *'. 



* Phil. Mag. vol. L. p. 317. 



