SWALLOWS. 
243 
On the 16th of November, 1826, a gentleman residing 
near Loch Awe, in Scotland, having occasion to examine an 
outhouse, used as a cart- shed, saw an unusual appearance 
upon one of the rafters, which crossed and supported the 
l thatched roof. Upon mounting a ladder, he found to his 
astonishment, that this was a group of Chimney- Swallows 
(. Hirundo rustled), which had taken up their Winter quarters 
in this exposed situation. The group consisted of five, com- 
pletely torpid, and none of the tribe to which they belonged 
had been seen for five or six weeks previously : he took them 
in his hand as they lay closely and coldly huddled together, 
and conveyed them to his house, in order to exhibit them as 
objects of curiosity to the other members of his family. For 
some time they remained to all appearance lifeless ; hut the 
temperature of the apartment into which they were carried 
being considerably raised, by a good turf fire, they gradually 
evinced symptoms of reanimation ; and in less than a quarter 
of an hour, finding that they were rather rudely handled, all 
of them recovered, so as to fly impatiently round the room 
in search of some opening, by which they might escape. 
The window was thrown up, and they soon found their way 
into the fields, and were never seen again. 
A similar circumstance, though, from the place of its 
discovery, it must refer probably to Sand Martins, was 
related by a gentleman, who found two Swallows, in a sand- 
bank at Newton, near Stirling, quite dormant. 
Again at Belleville, in North America, a gentleman ob- 
served one evening, a little after sun-set, late in the Autumn, 
a vast number of Swallows collected together, high in the 
air, and hovering over a particular spot. Having been 
informed by one of his school-fellows, when a boy, that 
Swallows had been seen to dive into a mill-pond and dis- 
appear, he determined to watch these, and in about ten or 
fifteen minutes, as darkness came on, they lowered their 
flight, and gathered themselves into a smaller circle, and at 
length poured down into a very large hollow sycamore-tree. 
It was observed that they came out for several successive 
days, and returned in the evening in the same manner. In 
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