this with its soot and its battlement of gaseous 

 chimney-pots, even though it is a university 

 roof with the great gilded dome of a state house 

 shining down upon it. One whose feet have 

 always been in the soil does not take kindly to 

 tar and tin. But anything open to the sky is 

 open to some of the birds, for the paths of many 

 of the migrants lie close along the clouds. 



Other birds than the passing migrants, how- 

 ever, sometimes come within range of my look- 

 out. The year around there are English spar- 

 rows and pigeons ; and all through the summer 

 scarcely an evening passes when a few chimney- 

 swallows are not in sight. 



"With the infinite number and variety of 

 chimneys hedging me in, I naturally expected 

 to find the sky alive with swallows. Indeed, I 

 thought that some of the twenty -six pots at the 

 corners of my roof would be inhabited by the 

 birds. Ifot so. While I can nearly always find 

 a pair of swallows in the air, they are surpris- 

 ingly scarce, and, so far as I know, they rarely 

 build in the heart of the city. There are more 

 canaries in my block than chimney-swallows in 

 all my sky. 



[5] 



