nd I see them resting on the dead limbs of a
plum-tree across the road. But more are to follow, and parental anxiety
is still rife. I shall be sorry when the spacious hayloft becomes
silent. That affectionate "Wit, wit" and that contented and caressing
squeaking and chattering give me a sense of winged companionship. The
old barn is the abode of friendly and delicate spirits, and the sight of
them and the sound of them surely bring a suggestion of poetry and
romance to these familiar scenes.

Is not the swallow one of the oldest and dearest of birds? Known to the
poets and sages and prophets of all peoples! So infantile, so helpless
and awkward upon the earth, so graceful and masterful on the wing, the
child and darling of the summer air, reaping its invisible harvest in
the fields of space as if it dined on the sunbeams, touching no earthly
food, drinking and bathing and mating on the wing, swiftly, tirelessly
coursing the long day through, a thought on wings, a lyric in the shape
of a bird! Only in the free fields of the summer air could it have got
that steel-blue of the wings and that warm tan of the breast. Of course
I refer to the barn swallow. The cliff swallow seems less a child of the
sky and sun, probably because its sheen and glow are less, and its shape
and motions less arrowy. More varied in color, its hues yet lack the
intensity, and its flight the swiftness, of those of its brother of the
haylofts. The tree swallows and the bank swallows are pleasing, but they
are much more local and restricted in their ranges than the
barn-frequenters. As a farm boy I did not know them at all, but the barn
swallows the summer always brought.

After all, there is but one swallow; the others are particular kinds
that we specify. How curious that men should ever have got the notion
that this airy, fairy creature, this playmate of the sunbeams, spends
the winter hibernating in the mud of ponds and marshes, the bedfellow of
newts and frogs and turtles! It is an Old-World legend, born of the
blindness and superstition of earlier times. One knows that the rain of
the rainbow may be gathered at one's feet in a mud-puddle, but the
fleeting spectrum of the bow is not a thing of life. Yet one would as
soon think of digging up a rainbow in the mud as a swallow. The swallow
follows the sun, and in August is off for the equatorial regions, where
it hibernates on the wing, buried in tropical sunshine.

Well, this brilliant day is a g