98 FIELD AND HEDGEROW, 
of the turf? You must imagine it given the power to 
rise over hedges, to make short angles about buildings, 
slip between the trunks of trees, to avoid moving objects, 
as men or animals, not to come in contact with other 
animated arrows, and by some mysterious instinct to 
know what is or what is not out of sight on the other 
side of the wall. I was sitting on a log in the narrowest 
of narrow lanes, a hedge at the back, in front thick fir 
trees, whose boughs touched the ground, almost within 
reach, the lane being nothing more than a broader foot- 
path. It was one of those overcast days when the shelter 
of the hedge and the furze was pleasant in July. Sud- 
denly a swallow slid by me as it seemed underneath my 
very hands, so close to the ground that he almost 
travelled in the rut, the least movement on my part 
would have stopped him. Almost before I could lift 
my head he had reached the end of the lane and rose 
over the gate into the road—not a moments pause 
before he made that leap over the gate to see if there 
was a waggon or not in the way ; a waggon-load of hay 
would have blocked the road entirely. How did he 
know that a man or a horse would not step into his 
course at the instant he topped the bar? 
A swallow never hesitates, never looks, before he 
leaps, threads all day the eyes of needles, and goes on 
from half-past two in the morning till ten at night, with- 
out so much as disturbing a feather. He is the perfec. 
tion of a machine for falling. His round nest is under 
the eaves, he throws himself out of window and begins 
to fall, and keeps on fall, fall, for twenty hours together. 
His head is bullet-shaped, his neck short, his body all 
thickened up to the shoulders, tailing out to the merest 
streak of feather, His form is like a plummet—he is 
not unlike the heavily weighted minnow uscd in trolling 
