range of my look-out. The year around there are English sparrows and
pigeons; and all through the summer scarcely an evening passes when a few
chimney-swallows are not in sight.

With the infinite number and variety of chimneys hedging me in, I
naturally expected to find the sky alive with swallows. Indeed, I thought
that some of the twenty-six pots at the corners of my roof would be
inhabited by the birds. Not so. While I can nearly always find a pair of
swallows in the air, they are surprisingly scarce, and, so far as I know,
they rarely build in the heart of the city. There are more canaries in my
block than chimney-swallows in all my sky.

The swallows are not urban birds. The gas, the smoke, the shrieking
ventilators, and the ceaseless sullen roar of the city are hardly to their
liking. Perhaps the flies and gnats which they feed upon cannot live in
the air above the roofs. The swallows want a sleepy old town with big
thunderful chimneys, where there are wide fields and a patch of quiet
water.

Much more numerous than the swallows are the night-hawks. My roof, in
fact, is the best place I have ever found to study their feeding habits.
These that flit through my smoky dusk may not make city nests, though the
finding of such nests would not surprise me. Of course a night-hawk's
_nest_, here or anywhere else, would surprise me; for like her cousin, the
whippoorwill, she never builds a nest, but stops in the grass, the gravel,
the leaves, or on a bare rock, deposits her eggs without even scratching
aside the sticks and stones that may share the bed, and in three days is
brooding them--brooding the stones too.

It is likely that some of my hawks nest on the buildings in the