We all notice the first swallow almost as soon as the first cuckoo; for though the one bird's note catches the ear, the flight of the other arrests the eye as certainly. And what a flight it is! Has it ever been computed how many hundred miles it flies every day? For hours they are on the wing, flying at the rate of a mile a minute, and always with exquisite grace. Watch a bird crossing a hay-field, winding in and out of the hay-cocks, rising just sufficiently to clear the hedge at the bottom, wheeling round over the gate, and then up the lane, almost, so it seems, skimming the ground as it goes, and yet without an effort lifting itself up over the spinney, and so dropping back into the hay-field. Their judgment is so accurate that they never have to turn at an angle, but, always allowing for the curve beforehand, make their course with a beautifully easy sweep. When there are young ones to feed their speed is even swifter, their industry more untiring, for instead of breaking off in their insect hunting to circle in play with their fellows, or to race the swifts across the sky, they have only the one idea, to fill their beaks as full as they will hold, and hurry back to the nest. The swallow does not go back to its young with a single fly at a time, but with a mouth filled as full as possible, so that those who try to calculate the usefulness of this bird by the number of the journeys that it makes to its nest, underestimate its destruction of insects by probably fifty per cent. Although, perhaps, few who watch the birds know it, the swallow's wide-gaping mouth is sticky inside, so that everything it catches it holds, and in this way is spared interminable miles of journeying. To see them at their best is when a hawk passes, and, for sheer mischief, the swallows chase it. The hawk is flying, as hawks can fly, with great swiftness; but look at the velocity of the swallows, which fly round and round the hawk as it goes! They hover over it, loiter by the side of it, make excursions ahead of it, and come back, mock it, in fact, as if it were an owl, or as hares might mock and mob a tortoise. And the hawk never even pretends to chase one of the swallows, but goes doggedly on its way, as fast as it can go, to the cover of the wood. To see the swallow at its worst is upon the ground: there it is a poor thing indeed, and from the shortness of its legs and the length of its wings, has to shuffle along, rather than walk.