PURPLE MARTIN. 337 
fly away for some distance before they begin to greet the new day with their loud 
chants. All these and many other garden birds add much to the pleasures of country 
life, but none of them in the familiar and attractive manner of the cozy Purple Martin, 
which always likes to breed in colonies of two to twenty and more pairs. How 
wonderfully glitters their blue-black plumage in the finest purple and violet hues, how 
charmingly graceful is their flight, how cozy and exhilerating their melodious, loud, and 
twittering song, and what a peaceful and gay life do they impart to garden and yard 
by all this, and by their incessant flying to and fro! City people and late risers have 
no conception of the lovely idyll that developes itself before our eyes in the earliest 
morning hours. How contented and happy man could be, how delightfully in sympathy 
with nature’s own attractions, if he more frequently would lift his eyes from the simply 
realistic to the ideal, to what is beautiful and refining! 
Our Martin-house, which has twelve comfortable rooms (each 10X10 inches wide 
and 10 inches in height), stands on a strong post about eighteen feet high. ‘The beau- 
tiful star creeper’, evergreen fragrant honey-suckles, the climbing Solanum jasminoides, 
and the Mexican mountain rose-vine* are trailing over the trellis and along the post. 
Around this group of beautiful vines are planted young thrifty palms, but particularly 
gorgeously flowering amaryllis*, crinums, and spider lilies‘. The three last named plant- 
forms, really tropical productions of the amaryllis family, occupy in the South the places 
filled in the North by the lilies, which, with the exception of several species (L. Jongiflorum, 
L. longifiorum Harrisii, L. Brownii, L. speciosum), do not thrive very far south. The 
spider lily and many of the crinums excel chiefly by their fragrance, the noble amaryllids 
by richness of their hues and fine form. We see these blossoms before us, just now 
varying from the most glowing red to a very delicate light pearly and creamy-white. 
Many of them show an intense vermilion, which is relieved by a yellowish+or greenish- 
white star in the throat of the flower. Most beautiful are the bright red kinds, which 
seem to be covered with countless sparks of gold whenever the direct rays of the sun 
rest on them. But still more beautiful and glittering is the plumage of our Purple 
Martins, which are now flying in and out in the full sunny brightness of the morning. 
None of our Swallows are so generally known nor such favorites as is the 
Martin. Everywhere, from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, and from Florida and 
Texas to high northern latitudes, this bird is known. Wherever, throughout this 
immense territory, man settles down, it becomes his companion, whether it be near the 
log-cabin, crudely built in the primeval forest, or near the simple sod-dwellings of the 
settler on the wide treeless prairie of the far West. It is abundantly present in villages 
and even in cities, and is everywhere a welcomed favorite, whose coming is yearningly 
expected, joyfully greeted, and whose departure causes a pang of melancholy. None of 
our Swallows have attached themselves as intimately to the human family as these. 
All the other species are more pretentious in their claims, and will breed only where the 
conditions are particularly favorable. The Martin is as well satisfied with the simple 
hollow gourd attached to a pole near a negro hut, as with the most ornamental and 
best arranged Martin-house in the beautiful gardens and parks of rich planters and 
opulent merchants. Where no nesting-boxes are provided, our Martin will not breed, 
1 Rhychospermum jasminoides. 2 Antigonon leptopus. 3 Hippeastrum. 1 Hymenocallis Carihzxa. 
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