The Barn- swallow 35 



every season and built their nest on a projecting beam under 

 the eaves, about six or seven feet from the ground. 



At the bottom of the mountain, in a large barn belonging 

 to the tavern there, I counted upward of twenty nests, all 

 seemingly occupied. In the woods they are never met with; 

 as you approach a farm they soon catch the eye, cutting their 

 gambols in the air. Scarcely a barn to which these birds can 

 find access is without them, and as the public feeling is 

 universally in their favor they are seldom or never disturbed. 

 The proprietor of the barn just mentioned, a German, assured 

 me that if a man permitted the Swallows to be shot, his cows 

 would give bloody milk, and also that no barn where Swallows 

 frequented would ever be struck by lightning, and I nodded 

 assent. When the turrets of superstition "lean to the side of 

 humanity" one can readily respect them. 



Early in May they begin to build. From the size and 

 structure of the nest it is nearly a week before it is completely 

 finished. One of these nests, taken on the 21st of June from 

 the rafter to which it was attached, is now lying before me. It 

 is in the form of an inverted cone with a perpendicular section 

 cut off on that side by which it adhered to the wood. At the 

 top it has an extension of the edge, or offset, for the male or 

 female to sit on occasionally; the upper diameter is about six 

 inches by five, the height externally seven inches. This shell 

 is formed of mud, mixed with fine hay as plasterers do their 

 mortar with hair to make it adhere the better; the mud seems 

 to have been placed in regular strata, or layers, from side to 

 side; the hollow of this cone (the shell of which is about an 

 inch in thickness) is filled with fine hay, well stuffed in; above 

 that is laid a handful of very large downy goose feathers. The 

 eggs are five, white, speckled and spotted all over with reddish- 

 brown. Owing to the semi-transparency of the shell the eggs 



