546 NATURAL HISTORY 



When Mr. Townsend avers that the Nightingales at Yalez l 

 sing the winter through, I should conclude that he took up 

 that notion on mere report, because I had a brother who 

 lived eighteen years at Gibraltar, and who has written an 

 accurate Natural History of that rock, and its environs. 

 Now, he says that Nightingales leave Andalusia as regularly 

 towards autumn as other summer birds of passage. A pair 

 always breeds in the Governor's garden at the Convent. 

 This history has never been published, and probably now 

 never will, because the poor author has been dead some 

 years. There is in his journals such ocular demonstration 

 of swallow emigration to and from Barbary at Spring and 

 Pall, as I know, would delight you much. There is an Hi- 

 rundo hiberna that comes to Gibraltar in October and de- 

 parts in March, and abounds in and about the Garrison the 

 winter through. 2 



LETTER VI. 



TO ROBERT MARSHAM, ESQUIRE. 



SELBORNE, August 7, 1792. 



HILE all the young people of this neighbour- 

 hood are gone madding this morning to the 

 great last day's review at Bagshot, I am 

 sitting soberly down to write to my friend 

 in Norfolk ; almost forgetting, now I am 

 old, the impulse that young men feel to run after new 



1 Townsend (" Travels in Spain ") wrote " Velez," f. e. Velez Malaga, 

 an older city than the present Malaga, on the old main road to Granada. 

 -ED. 



2 See Letter XXXII. to Pennant (p. 102), where White identifies his 

 brother's bird, and correctly so, with the Hirundo rupestris of Scopoli. 

 It is again mentioned by him in the seventh letter of the present series. 

 KD. 



