190 NATURAL HISTORY 



The old tortoise, that I have mentioned in a former 

 letter, still continues in this garden; and retired under 

 ground about the 20th of November, and came out again 

 for one day on the 30th : it lies now buried in a wet 

 swampy border under a wall facing to the south, and is 

 enveloped at present in mud, and mire ! 



Here is a large rookery round this house, the inhabitants 

 of which seem to get their livelihood very easily ; for they 

 spend the greatest part of the day on their nest-trees when 

 the weather is mild. These rooks retire every evening all 

 the winter from this rookery, where they only call by the 

 way, as they are going to roost in deep woods : at the dawn 

 of day they always revisit their nest- trees, and are preceded 

 a few minutes by a flight of daws, that act, as it were, as 

 their harbingers. 



LETTER XVIII. 



TO THE HONOURABLE DAINES BARRINGTON. 



SELBORNE, Jan. 29, 1774. 



: HE house swallow, or chimney swallow, is, un- 

 undoubtedly, the first comer of all the British 

 Hirundines ; and appears in general on or 

 about the 13th of April, as I have remarked 

 from many years' observation. Not but now 

 and then a straggler is seen much earlier : and, in particular, 

 when I was a boy, I observed a swallow for a whole day 

 together on a sunny warm Shrove Tuesday ; which day could 

 not fall out later than the middle of March, and oflen hap- 

 pened early in February. 



It is worth remarking that these birds are seen first about 

 lakes and mill-ponds ; and it is also very particular, that if 

 these early visitors happen to find frost and snow, as was 

 the case of the two dreadful springs of 1770 and 1771, they 

 immediately withdraw 1 for a time. A circumstance this, 



1 It has been remarked by the Hon. and Rev. W. Herbert that it 



