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CORRESPONDENCE. 
Departure of Swallows in 1838. 
Have any of your correspondents called your attention to the time of the 
departure of the Swallows this last season ? If so, does the date of the large 
flight agree with the 29th of September ?, on which morning, very early, the 
greater part of our welcome Summer visitants left this neighbourhood. The day 
or two preceding the 28th had been wet and cold, so that I could see little of them ; 
but the 28th was a very lovely “last of the Summer days” of 1838. The sun 
shone almost the whole of the day in cloudless splendour. The Swallows were 
early astir, and highly busy, in assembled multitudes on the roofs of one or two 
houses exposed to the rays of the morning sun. In that very excellent work the 
Journal of a Naturalist , the Swallows are said to travel “ much by night, 
requiring the light of the moon to direct them.” If so, I suspect the colony 
located here made a “ morning flit” of it, for I watched them practising their 
circling flight rather late in the eve, and on the morn of the 29th they were 
gone. The wind, I observed, was from the North, and the moon shone so as to 
lengthen their day. After this I saw a dozen or two skimming about the village 
until Oct. 10, and as late as the 20th I observed a single pair flying about, on 
which day, for the first time this Autumn, I heard the Royston Crow ( Corvus 
cornix ), a regular visitant to these parts at this time of the year. 
Notes on British Reptiles. 
In my rambles on the 28th of Sept., I caught three small specimens of the 
Nimble Lizard ( Lacerta agilis ), all of them without tails, yet very lively. 
Are these little creatures produced so ? or is it the effect of accident ? in two I 
could find no appearance of a wound; the third got away before I could examine 
it. These pretty diminutive reptiles are easily tamed, and will readily feed out 
of the hand, when kept in confinement. Some little time since, I had two of 
them in a large glass globe, or Gold-fish jar, with a Mole Cricket (G. gryllotaljoa) 
and a Common Snake {Coluber natrix). At the bottom of the jar I put Sand, 
and occasionally introduced a sod of fresh Grass. These little prisoners I fed 
every morning with Ants, House Flies, the larvae of Gnats, and bread-crumbs 
soaked in milk. They lived to all appearance in perfect harmony, till my 
leaving home for a week or two in the Autumn, when their wants were not quite 
so regularly attended to ; the consequence was that the Snakesacrificed poor little 
Moly to his appetite, and severely attacked and injured one of the Lizards. I 
then turned them into a pasture, to purvey for themselves from Nature’s “ board 
of green cloth.” 
