sake of the glad season of their stay. If,
moreover, it is a question of choice between these untiring travellers
resting in our eaves and the stay-at-home starling or sparrow, the
choice will surely fall on the first every time.

The swift is the largest and most rapid in its flight, and its voice has
a penetrating quality lacking in the notes of the rest. Swifts screaming
in headlong flight about a belfry or up and down a country lane are the
embodiment of that sheer joy of life which, in some cases with slender
reason, we associate peculiarly with the bird-world. Probably, however,
these summer migrants are as happy as most of their class. On the wing
they can have few natural enemies, though one may now and again be
struck down by a hawk; and they alight on the ground so rarely as to run
little risk from cats or weasels, while the structure and position of
their nests alike afford effectual protection for the eggs and young.
Compared with that of the majority of small birds, therefore, their
existence should be singularly happy and free from care; and though
that of the swift can scarcely, perhaps, when we remember its shrill
voice, be described as one grand sweet song, it should not be chequered
by many troubles. The greatest risk is no doubt that of being snapped up
by some watchful pike if the bird skims too close to the surface of
either still or running water, and I have even heard of their being
seized in this way by hungry mahseer, those great barbel which gladden
the heart of exiled anglers whose lot is cast on the banks of Himalayan
rivers.

It is, however, the sparrows and starlings, rivals for the nesting
sites, who show themselves the irreconcilable enemies of the returned
prodigals. Terrific battles are continually enacted between them with
varying fortunes, and the anecdotes of these frays would fill a volume.
Jesse tells of a feud at Hampton Court, in the course of which the
swallows, having only then completed their nest, were evicted by
sparrows, who forthwith took possession and hatched out their eggs. Then
came Nemesis, for the sparrows were compelled to go foraging for food
with which to fill the greedy beaks, and during their enforced absence
the swallows returned in force, threw the nestlings out, and demolished
the home. The sparrows sought other quarters, and the swallows
triumphantly built a new nest on the ruins of the old. A German writer
relates a case of revolting reprisal on the part