WAYS OF NATURE 



bodies touched. Moreover, a large number of them 

 were constantly on the wing, showing against the 

 sky light as if they were leaving the chimney. But 

 they did not leave it. They rose up a few feet and 

 then resumed their positions upon the sides, and it 

 was this movement that caused the humming sound. 

 All the while the droppings of the birds came down 

 like a summer shower. At the bottom of the shaft 

 was a mine of guano three or four feet deep, with a 

 dead swift here and there upon it. Probably one or 

 more birds out of such a multitude died every night. 

 I had fancied there would be many more. It was a 

 long time before it dawned upon me what this unin- 

 terrupted flight within the chimney meant. Finally 

 I saw that it was a sanitary measure : only thus could 

 the birds keep from soiling each other with their 

 droppings. Birds digest very rapidly, and had they 

 all continued to cling to the sides of the wall, they 

 would have been in a sad predicament before morn- 

 ing. Like other acts of cleanliness on the part of 

 birds, this was doubtless the prompting of instinct 

 and not of judgment. It was Nature looking out for 

 her own. 



In view, then, of the doubtful sense or intelligence 

 of the wild creatures, what shall we say of the new 

 school of nature writers or natural history roman- 

 cers that has lately arisen, and that reads into the 

 birds and animals almost the entire human psycho- 

 logy ? This, surely : so far as these writers awaken an 

 13 



