SWIFTS. 
205 
and decent reserve more may be said than can with truth of 
every individual of her sex ; since she is 
«< , quae nec reticere loquenti, 
Nec prior ipsa loqui didicit resouabilis echo."* 
I am, &c. 
P.S. The classic reader will, I trust, pardon the following 
lovely quotation, so finely describing echoes, and so poetically 
accounting for their causes from popular superstition : 
Quae bend quom videas, rationem reddere possis 
Tute tibi atque aliis, quo pacto per loca sola 
Saxa pareis formas verborum ex ordine reddant, 
Palanteis comites quom monteis inter opacos 
Quserimus, et magna dispersos voce ciemus. 
Sex etiam, aut septem loca vidi reddere voces 
Unam quom jaceres ; ita colles collibus ipsis 
Verba repulsantes iterabant dicta referre, 
Hsec loca capripedes Satyros, Nymphasque tenere 
Finitimi fingunt, et Faunos esse loquuntur ; 
Quorum noctiv ago strepitu, ludoque jocanti 
Adfirmant volgo taciturna silentia rumpi, 
Chordarumque sonos fieri, dulceisque querelas. 
Tibia quas fundit digitis pulsata canentum ; 
Et genus agricoliim late sentiscere, quom Pan 
Pinea semiferi capitis velamina quassans. 
Unco ssepe labro calamos percurrit hianteis. 
Fistula silvestrem ne cesset fundere musam." 
Lucretius, Lib. iv. 1. 576. 
' LETTER XXXIX. To the Hon. DAINES BARRINGTON, 
DEAR SIR, Selborne, May 13, 1778. 
Among the many singularities attending those amusing birds 
the swifts, I am now confirmed in the opinion that we have every 
year the same number of pairs invariably ; at least the result of 
my enquiry has been exactly the same for a long time past. The 
swallows and martins are so numerous, and so widely distributed 
over the village, that it is hardly possible to recount them ; while 
the swifts, though they do not all build in the church, yet so fre- 
quently haunt it, and play and rendezvous round it, that they are 
easily enumerated. The number that I constantly find are eight 
pairs ; about half of which reside in the church, and the rest build 
* One of the finest echoes I ever remember to have heard was at sea, near the town of St. 
Pierre, in Guernsey. The reverberation of the report nf the evening gun from rock to rock was 
grand in the extreme, and after dying away, as might be imagined, was again repeated from 
some rocks at a distance, with the same thundering continuous roll that was heard before. — £d. 
