music of a brook it flows on indefinitely. At times the old 
barn is permeated with its melody. Swallows on every rafter 
and in every cranny and coursing through the air seem filled 
with the most intense joy of the music. Then all is silent 
except for the twittering of the young; anon the song bursts 
forth again and swells into a loud chorus and dwindles into a 
soft low air as if a master leader were swinging his baton. 
Not only do the swallows sing thus in the barns, but as they 
course the fields or skim the ponds, and perhaps best of all 
when a group of them welcome the morning sun from a roof- 
side. Cur Barn Swallow is an accomplished singer, and, as a 
proof that he delights in his own song, he does not limit it to the 
courtship season but continues it through the arduous time of 
the rearing of the young and even after the young have left the 
nest and are abroad. From the first day of their arrival in 
late April till the end of August and even into September this 
charming bird sings. Very few birds have such a long and 
continuous song season. 
The Tree Swallow is far inferior in voice to his cousin the 
Barn Swallow. In fact, it is the common belief that he has no 
song and there would be full excuse for the belief. Such, 
however, is not the fact. He is our earliest bird to regularly 
welcome the dawn by song, even anticipating the Robin. 
The Tree Swallows’ song, for such it must be called, is a rather 
monotonous and rather labored repetition of rolling or warb¬ 
ling notes. Every third or fourth is sharper and shorter, and 
at times the notes may possibly be called melodious. Its 
association however, makes it a pleasing song especially when 
the notes shower down from a multitude of throats in the dim 
light of dawn. 
This last season a pair of Tree Swallows reared a brood of 
young in a nesting box on the outside of a porch on my Ipswich 
house and a pair of Barn Swallows nested and successfully 
reared five young on top of a pillar under the same porch so 
that I was able to observe and compare the habits of these two 
species. I have no intention of giving statistics as to the 
number of times the young were fed per hour, or to calculate 
the number of insects devoured, — in fact I made no notes of 
these important but rather dull facts, — but I would call 
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