From the summit of Black Mount the grassy hill slopes sharply beneath your feet to the road and beyond this to the home acres of the Webster place, the roof tree far below you and the house snuggling among the trees that the great statesman loved, many of which he planted. A little farther on stands a great barn with huge mows and the big hay doors front and rear always hospitably open to the scores of barn swallows that build on the beams up next the roof. In no barn have I found quite so many swallows at home. At every vantage point on a beam, wherever a corner of a timber or a locking pin protrudes to give a support, nests have been built, generation following generation till some of the structures are curious, deep, inverted mud pyramids, topped with straw and grass and lined with feathers, downy beds for the clamorous young. I can think of no finer picture of rural peace than such a barn as this, the cool wind sighing gently through the wide doors, the beams stretching across the cavernous space above dotted with the gray nests, the air full of the friendly, homey twittering of the birds, some resting and preening their feathers on the beams, others swinging in amazing flight down and out through the doors to skim the grass of the neighboring fields and marshes for food, then flashing back again to the hungry nestlings. Such barns grow fewer year by year here in eastern Massachusetts, and the pleasant intimacy of the barn swallows is but a happy recollection in the mind of many of us, more is the pity. It is worth a trip to Marshfield just to foregather with such a colony.