their expression was low and cunning. They were
almost as bad as bats! Worst of all, the young birds had an untidy habit
of tumbling out of the nests down into the fireplaces, whether there was
a fire or not. Now, I have no conscientious objection to roasting birds,
but I prefer to choose my birds, and to kill them first.

One morning I had gathered and carried out of doors eight foolish,
frightened, huddling things, and one dead young one from the
sitting-room embers, and I returned to find Jonathan kneeling on the
guest-room hearth, one arm thrust far up the chimney. "What are you
doing, Jonathan?" The next moment there was the familiar rush of wings,
which finally subsided behind the fresh pillows of the bed. Jonathan
sprang up. "Wait! I'll get it!" He carefully drew away the pillow, his
hand was almost on the poor little quivering wretch, when it made
another rush, hurled itself against the mirror, upset a vase full of
columbines, and finally sank behind the wood-box. At last it was caught,
and Jonathan, going over to the hearth, resumed his former position.
"Jonathan! Put him out of doors!" I exclaimed. "Sh-h-h," he responded,
"I'm going to teach him to go back the way he came. There he goes! see?"
He rose, triumphant, and began to brush the soot out of his collar and
hair. I was sorry to dash such enthusiasm, but I felt my resolution
hardening within me.

"Jonathan," I said, "we did not come to the farm to train chimney
swallows. Besides, I don't wish them trained, I wish them _kept out_. I
don't regard them as suitable for household pets. If you will sink to a
pet bird, get a canary."

"But you wouldn't have an old house without chimney swallows!" he
remonstrated in tones of real pain.

"I would indeed."

It ended in a compromise. At the top of the chimney Jonathan put a
netting over half the flues; the others he left open at the top, but set
in nettings in the corresponding flues just above each fireplace. And
so in half the chimney the swallows still build, but the young ones now
drop on the nettings instead of in the embers, and lie there cheeping
shrilly until somehow their parents or friends convey them up again
where they belong. And I no longer spend my mornings collecting
apronfuls of frightened and battered little creatures. At dusk the
swallows still eddy and circle about the chimney, but Jonathan has lost
the opportunity for training them. Once more the optimist is balked.

But in these matters