94 FIELD AND HEDGERON’ 
SWALLOW-TIME. 
THE eave-swallows have come at last with the mid- 
summer-time, and the hay and white clover and warm 
winds that breathe hotly, like one that has been running 
uphill. With the paler hawkweeds, whose edges are so 
delicately trimmed and cut and balanced, almost as if 
made by deft human fingers to human design, whose 
globes of down are like geometrical circles built up of 
facets, instead of by one revolution of the compasses. 
With foxglove, and dragon-fly, and yellowing wheat; 
with green cones of fir, and boom of distant thunder, 
and all things that say, ‘It is summer.’ Not many of 
them even now, sometimes only two in the air together, 
sometimes three or four, and one day cight, the very 
greatest number—a mere handful, for these eave-swallows 
at such times should crowd the sky. The white bars 
across their backs should be seen gliding beside the 
dark fir copse a quarter of a mile away. They should 
be scen everywhere, over the house, and to and fro the 
eaves, where half last year’s nest remains; over the 
meadows and high up in the blue ether. White breasts 
should gleam in the azure height, appearing and disap- 
pearing as they climb or sink, and wheel and slide 
through those long boomerang-like flights that suddenly 
take them a hundred yards aside. They should crowd 
