Our sharp-eyed parson had observed that the nesting habits of birds afford a clue to their roosting habits,--that they usually pass the night in or near those places where they build their nests. Thus, the tree-builders roost in trees; the ground-builders upon the ground. I have seen our chickadee and woodpecker enter, late in the day, the cavities in decaying limbs of trees. I have seen the oriole dispose of herself for the night on the end of a maple branch where her “pendent bed and procreant cradle” was begun a few days later. In walking through the summer fields in the twilight, the vesper sparrow or the song sparrow will often start up from almost beneath one’s feet. It is said that the snow-bunting will plunge beneath the snow and pass the night there. The ruffled grouse often does this, but the swallows seem to be an exception to this rule. I have seen a vast cloud of swifts take up their lodging for the night in a tall, unused chimney; but the barn swallows and the cliff and the white-bellied swallows, at least after the young have flown, appear to pass the night in the vicinity of streams. White noticed also--and here the true observer again crops out--that the fieldfare, a kind of thrush, though a tree-builder, always appears, to pass the night on the ground. “The larkers, in dragging their nets by night, frequently catch them in the wheat stubbles.” He learned, as every observer sooner or later learns, to be careful of sweeping statements,--that the truth of nature is not always caught by the biggest generalizations. After speaking of the birds that dust themselves, earth their plumage--_pulveratrices_, as he calls them--he says, “As far as I can observe, many birds that dust themselves never wash, and I once thought that those birds that wash themselves would never dust; but here I find myself mistaken,” and he instances the house sparrow as doing both. White seems to have been about the first writer upon natural history who observed things minutely; he saw through all those sort of sleight-o’-hand movements and ways of the birds and beasts. He held his eye firmly to the point. He saw the swallows feed their young on the wing; he saw the fern-owl, while hawking about a large oak, “put out its short leg while on the wing, and by a bend of the head deliver something into its mouth.” This explained to him the use of its middle toe, “which is curiously furnished with a serrated claw.” He timed the white owls feeding their young under the eaves of his church, with watch in hand. He saw them transfer the mouse they brought, from the foot to the beak, that they might have the free use of the former in ascending to the nest.