X.] 
OF SELBORNE. 
29 
September the tweDty-ninth ; and yet tliey totally disappeared 
with us by the fifth of October. How strange it is that the 
swift, which seems to live exactly the same life with the 
swallow and house-martin, should leave us before the middle 
of August invariably ! while the latter stay often till the middle 
of October ; once I even saw numbers of house-martins on the 
seventh of November. The martins, redwings, and fieldfares 
THE SWALLOW. 
were flying in sight together ; an uncommon assemblage of 
summer and winter birds ! 
[It is not easy to discover whether White really believed in 
the hybernation of swallows or not ; he clings to the idea, and 
returns to it, although his own arguments seem to refute the 
notion almost as completely as those of any recent author. 
Writing twenty years later than the date of this letter, he tells 
us, in his Observations on Nature, March 23, 1788, that a gen- 
tleman who was this week on a visit at Waverly, took the oppor- 
tunity of examining some of the holes in the sand-bank with which 
