, would be its song. His passion was all for nature, and
his mother out of her small earnings had managed to get quite a number
of volumes together for him. These he read and re-read until he knew
them by heart; and on Sundays, or any other day they could take, those
two lonely ones would take a basket containing their luncheon, her work
and a book or two, and set out on a long ramble along the coast to pass
the day in some solitary spot among the sandhills.

With these two, the gentle woman and her quiet boy over his book, and
the kitchen fire to warm and dry us after each wetting, the bad weather
became quite bearable although it lasted many days. And it was amazingly
bad. The wind blew with a fury from the sea; it was hard to walk against
it. The people in hundreds waited in their dull apartments for a lull,
and when it came they poured out like hungry sheep from the fold, or
like children from a school, swarming over the green slope down to the
beach, to scatter far and wide over the sands. Then, in a little while;
a new menacing blackness would come up out of the sea, and by and by a
fresh storm of wind would send the people scuttling back into shelter.
So it went on day after day, and when night came the sound of the
ever-troubled sea grew louder, so that, shut up in our little rooms in
that back street, we had it in our ears, except at intervals, when the
wind howled loud enough to drown its great voice, and hurled tempests of
rain and hail against the roofs and windows.

To me the most amazing thing was the spectacle of the swifts. It was
late for them, near the end of August; they should now have been far
away on their flight to Africa; yet here they were, delaying on that
desolate east coast in wind and wet, more than a hundred of them. It was
strange to see so many at one spot, and I could only suppose that they
had congregated previous to migration at that unsuitable place, and were
being kept back by the late breeders, who had not yet been wrought up
to the point of abandoning their broods. They haunted a vast ruinous
old barn-like building near the front, which was probably old a century
before the town was built, and about fifteen to twenty pairs had their
nests under the eaves. Over this building they hung all day in a crowd,
rising high to come down again at a frantic speed, and at each descent
a few birds could be seen to enter the holes, while others rushed out to
join the throng, and then all rose an