The starlings that breed in the roof, though they leave the place later on and congregate in flocks roosting in trees, still come back now and then to revisit their homes, especially as the new year opens, when they alight on the house frequently and consult on the approaching important period of nesting. If you should be sitting near a window close under the roof where they are busy, reading a book, with the summer sunshine streaming in, now and then a flash like lightning will pass across the page. It is a starling rapidly vibrating his wings before he perches on the thatch; the swift succession of light and shadow as the wings intercept the rays of the sun causes an impression on the eye like that left by a flash of lightning. They are beautiful birds: on their plumage, when seen quite close, the light plays in iridescent gleams. Upon the roof of the old farmstead, too, the chirp of the sparrow never ceases the livelong day. It is amusing to see these birds in the nesting season carrying up long straws--towing their burden through the air with evident labour--or feathers. These they sometimes drop just as they arrive at their destination. Eager to utter a chirp to their mates, they open their beaks, and away floats the feather, but they catch it again before it reaches the ground. Fluffy feathers are great favourites. The fowls, as they fly up to roost on the beams in the sheds, beat out feathers from their clumsy wings; these lie scattered on the ground, marking the spot. These roosting-places are magazines from which the small birds draw their supplies for domestic purposes. The sparrows have their nests in lesser holes in the thatch: sometimes they use a swallow's nest built of mortar under the eaves, to which the owners have not returned. The older folk still retain some faint superstitions about swallows, looking upon them as semi-consecrated and not to be killed or interfered with. They will not have their nests knocked down. If they do not return to the eaves but desert their nests it is a sign of misfortune impending over the household. So, too, if the rooks quit the rookery or the colonies of bees in the hives on the sunny side of the orchard decay and do not swarm, but seem to die off, it is an evil omen. If at night a bird flutters against the window-pane in the darkness--as they will sometimes in a great storm of wind, driven, perhaps, from their roosting-places by the breaking of the boughs, and attracted by a light within--the knocking of their wings betokens that something sad is about to happen. If an invalid asks for a pigeon--taking a fancy to a dish of pigeons to eat--it is a sign either of coming dissolution or of extreme illness.