50 PIONEERS OF SPRING. 
They flew in silence, and all alone—nine 
little birds out of the south and the night— 
over the cold, restless sea towards England. - 
Sand-martin was their name, and Africa was 
where they had come from, all alone, and by 
night, for fear of the gulls and the hawks. 
An hour later the old-gold fly, rising from 
the road ten miles inland, was suddenly aware 
of a hurtling shadow, a, to him, cave-like beak, 
and of nothing else. He had been caught by 
one of the sand-martins. And almost in the 
same instant a column of winter gnats, dancing 
by the side of the road above the ditch, was 
decimated by the sand-martins darting through 
it, backwards and forwards, with lightning, 
jerky flight, and with wide-open beaks whose 
insides were sticky—scooping them up, in fact. 
That day the sand-quarry was invaded by 
the little party of spring’s pioneers, who all 
the afternoon darted and glanced this way 
and that above the pool in the bottom of the 
quarry, or clung to the sheer face of the sand- 
cliff, digging. 
Next morning, in the cold wind and the rain, 
however, workmen came and dug out the face 
of the sand-cliff, carrying away several fair- 
sized holes the tiny, weak little birds had 
already made to nest in. And the flock 
vanished. 
