58 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
It gave me satisfaction to find we accorded so well about 
the goatsucker; all I contended for was to prove that it often 
chatters sitting as well as flying; and therefore the noise was 
voluntary, and from organic impulse, and not from the resist- 
ance of the air against the hollow of its mouth and throat. 
If ever I saw anything like actual migration, it was last 
Michaelmas Day. I was travelling, and out early in the morn- 
ing ; at first there was a vast fog; but, by the time that I was 
got seven or eight miles from home towards the coast, the sun 
broke out into a delicate warm day. We were then on a large 
heath or common, and I could discern, as the mist began to 
break away, great numbers of swallows clustering on the 
stunted shrubs and bushes, as if they had roosted there all 
night. As soon as the air became clear and pleasant they 
were all on the wing at once; and, by a placid and easy flight, 
proceeded on southward towards the sea; after this I did not 
see any more flocks, only now and then a straggler. 
I cannot agree with those persons that assert that the swal- 
low kind disappear gradually, as they come, for the bulk of 
them seem to withdraw at once; only some stragglers stay 
behind a long while, and do never, there is the greatest reason 
to believe, leave this island. Swallows seem to lay themselves 
up, and to come forth in a warm day, as bats do continually of 
a warm evening, after they have disappeared for weeks. For 
a very respectable gentleman assured me that, as he was walk- 
ing with some friends under Merton wall on a remarkably hot 
noon, either in the last week in December or the first week in 
January, he espied three or four swallows huddled together on 
the moulding of one of the windows of that college. I have 
frequently remarked that swallows are seen later at Oxford than 
elsewhere : is it owing to the vast massy buildings of that place, 
to the many waters round it, or to what else? 
When I used to rise in the morning last autumn, and see the 
swallows and martins clustering on the chimneys and thatch of 
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