BIRDS OF A TEXAN WINTER.


White of Selborne was, on the whole, tolerably content to plunge his
swallows, or a good proportion of them, into the mud and deposit them
for the winter at the bottom of a pond. Professionally conservative, as
a fine old Church-of-England clergyman, though constitutionally
sceptical, as became one of the earliest of really observant
naturalists, he was loath to break flatly with the consensus of
contemporary opinion, rustic and philosophic, and found a _modus
vivendi_ in the theory that a great many, perhaps a majority, of the
swifts and barn-swallows did go to Africa. He had seen them organizing
their emigration-parties and holding noisy debate over the best time to
start and the best route to take. The sea-part of the travel was of
trifling length, and baiting-places were plenty in France, Spain, and
Italy. Sometimes, such was their power of wing, they were known to take
the outside route and strike boldly across the Bay of Biscay, for they
had alighted on vessels. Probably the worthy old man was reluctant to
wrench from the rural mind a harmless remnant of superstition,--if
superstition it might be called, in view of the fact that sundry
saurians and chelonians, held by classifiers to be superior in rank to
birds, do hibernate under water, and that, more marvellous than all, the
quarrymen of his day, like those of ours, insisted that living frogs
occasionally sprang from under their chisel, leaving an unchallengeable
impress in the immemorial rock. It must indeed have been up-hill work to
extinguish the old belief in the minds of men who had seen the