THE O RLE TON S WILTS. 
2 7 
hardly any Swallows, and early in October the air was so full of 
midges in the neighbourhood of Doncaster that you couldn’t talk 
as you walked. 
The Gulls, the white-aproned housemaids of the sea, that day 
by day sweep off from the ocean’s floor the impurities of the 
towns — what have they done, what are they doing, to be 
massacred by tens of thousands for a moment’s fashion ? The 
lavender-plumed Terns, the gray Phalarope and little Stint, 
birds of whom it may be said that of them “ the world was 
not worthy,” harmless and lovely in their lives — links of ancient 
life between land and land — why are they to be torn and 
trampled by the Juggernaut wheel of human vanity ? Much is 
lost and can never be replaced, and the fashion of 1890 will make 
the rest of the century poorer. The diamonds and gold and 
coral and precious stones of ancient civilisations were benefi- 
cent ; they fed the searchers, and held and increased their own 
value, and killed none ; now we are killing for a moment’s whim 
and luxury the living diamonds of the earth, the birds, just as 
some of us are beginning to know and love them as they never 
have been known and loved before. It is shameless irreverence 
for life. 
H. D. Gordon. 
THE ORLETON SWIFTS. 
(a letter to the right honble. the earl of selborne.) 
(Continued from p. 13.) 
E first eggs are laid here about the 1st of June. One 
Swift laid three eggs two years running. This is the 
only instance I know of the usual number being ex- 
ceeded. The period of incubation is unusually long 
for such a small bird. It is nineteen or twenty days. I can be 
quite sure of this, for I have had the eggs in my hand before 
sitting began, and have examined them every day towards the 
end of the time, and seen them pipped and the young ones free 
the next day. I have never found the old one sitting until the 
second day after the second egg was laid, and yet, though the 
two eggs seem to start fair, one is generally hatched out a day 
before the other. This was notably the case in the nest with 
the three eggs, and the young ones were of three sizes. 
The eggs are generally long and narrow, and so take up but 
little inconvenient room in the body of the bird, but sometimes 
they are short and in shape much like those of the House Martin. 
The two eggs of the same bird are of course alike, but one 
bird’s offspring will differ from another’s. They are beautifully 
white when fresh, and, like all small birds’ white eggs, very 
transparent when held up to the light. It is easy to tell whether 
a Swift’s egg is fresh or not. 
