“146 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
bird of this sort came within my observation. I only saw 
a few larks and whinchats, some rooks, and several kites and 
buzzards. 
About midsummer a flight of cross-bills comes to the pine- 
groves about this house, but never makes any long stay. 
The old tortoise, that I have mentioned in a former letter, 
still continues in this garden ; and retired under ground about 
the 20th of November, and came out again for one day on the 
30th: it lies now buried in a wet swampy border under a wall 
facing to the south, and is enveloped at present in mud and 
mire ! 
Here is a large rookery round this house, the inhabitants of 
which seem to get their livelihood very easily; for they spend 
the greatest part of the day on their nest-trees when the 
weather is mild. These rooks retire every evening all the 
winter from this rookery, where they only call by the way, as 
they are going to roost in the deep woods: at the dawn of 
day they always revisit their nest-trees, and are preceded a 
few minutes by a flight of daws, that act, as it were, as their 
harbingers. 
LETTER X VIT@ 
SELBORNE, /an. 29th, 1774. 
The house-swallow, or chimney-swallow, is undoubtedly the 
first comer of all the British /zrundines; and appears in 
general on or about the 13th of April, as I have remarked from 
many years’ observation. Not but now and then a straggler is 
seen much earlier; and, in particular, when I was a boy 
I observed a swallow for a whole day together on a sunny 
warm Shrove Tuesday; which day could not fall out later than 
the middle of March, and often happened early in February. 
It is worth remarking that these birds are seen first about 
