WILD LIFE ON THE WING 
went in scores because it was God's house. 
The west front of the tower carried a great 
dial, and every fifteen minutes, day or night, 
the church clock boomed the passage of the 
hour to the town. East of the tower the 
broad grey roofs of the body of the church 
nave, transepts, and Lady Chapel, lay cruci- 
form, and their leads, pinnacles, and gables 
were unvisited by man from month to month. 
The people of the church roofs were a 
people apart. They lived under the arms of 
the great gold cross, and men, busied with 
their own joys and griefs and labours in the 
smoky streets below, seldom molested them. 
There were the pigeons blue, white and pied 
who took their flights morning and evening 
over the town. They bred in the deeper 
crevices of the walls and among the dusty 
timbers above the belfry. The jackdaws also 
lived in the tower, a merry, social company. 
They fed on the leavings of the middens in 
the town below, and roosted, huddled together, 
under gables and buttresses. Then there were 
the starlings, cheerful gossips who came and 
went with the shifting of the seasons, fizzling 
and whistling in the sunshine, squabbling in 
the rain. The swifts were the aristocracy of 
the tower. They came in the warm weather, 
and could put a girdle round the spire thrice a 
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