“In the first place Swallows do no manner of harm; they neither eat fruits nor useful berries, nor do they disturb the nests and eggs of other birds. They are beautiful objects in the air, and their laughing twitter when on the wing is a sound that we should miss as much as many real bird songs. “‘These are pleasant qualities,’ some may say, ‘but not exactly useful.’ Listen! As these Swallows are Fleetwings and always birds of the air, so they are sky sweepers, living upon flying insects that few other birds may take, and the large amount of these that they consume is almost beyond belief; so watch when they come back next spring on their return as they fly over the cattle in the pasture, or over the pond surface teeming with insect life. If they do nothing else, they earn their living one and all by _mosquito-killing_, and the Wise Men of to-day know that the sting of one sort of mosquito is not merely an annoyance, but that it pushes the germ of malaria and other bad diseases straight into the blood. [Illustration: THE PURPLE MARTIN] “Not only are Swallows harmless and useful in the places where they nest, but are equally useful in all their journeyings through the south. Some birds, like the Bobolink, are both useful and harmless where they nest, but do harm as they travel, for when the Bobolink leaves for the south he goes into the rice-fields, eating the rice grains in late summer and plucking up the young rice in the spring. This, of course, gives him a bad name in the rice-growing regions through which he passes. “But the Swallow only destroys the evil insects as it journeys through the south, and yet in spite of this, cruel, or at best thoughtless, people kill them for the mere sport of killing, for no white man could pretend to eat Swallow pie, and the great flocks are tempting marks for ‘sportsmen’ of this class. Then, too, the noise made at the places where these birds roost, especially the Martins, has served as an excuse for shooting them in numbers. “If the people in the southern states would only fully understand that Swallows destroy the boll-weevil that damages the cotton in the pod, they surely would not allow a feather of these little workers to be injured. “How I wish we could have a Kind Hearts’ Club in every district school in the south, so that the children there might help us to protect the birds during the time that they are beyond our reach.” Gray Lady paused and turned the leaves of her scrap-book, as if she was searching for something. “Ah! here it is!” she said at last, half to herself. “The Wise Men at Washington who find out for us all the facts about the useful birds have been writing about these Swallows, and say that everything should be done not only to protect them but in every way to aid their increase by providing homes for them. Let us hear what more they say about these five that I have just described to you.”