barn-yard, we asked a boy if there were any martins there. “ Martins?” he inquired, looking puzzled. “ No, marm; I never heard tell of such birds hereabouts.” The same question was very often asked, and only, in two or three instances, received a different answer; some elderly persons replying that formerly there certainly were martins here. At length, however, we discovered a few, found their abode, and observed them coming and going, and a little later, we saw others on a farm about two miles from the village; still, their numbers must be very small when compared with the other varieties which everybody knows, and which are almost constantly in sight through the warm weather. It is possible that the flock may have been diminished, of late years, by some accidental cause; but such, at least, is the state of things just now.
The pretty little bank-swallow, another very common and numerous tribe, is entirely a stranger here, though found on the banks of lakes and rivers at no great distance; we have seen them, indeed, in large flocks, among the sand-hills near the Susquehanna, just beyond the southern borders of the county. This is the only swallow common to both hemispheres, and it is of this bird that M. de Châteaubriand remarks he had found it everywhere, in all his wanderings over Asia, Africa, Europe, and America.
That the cliff-swallow should also be a stranger here, is not at all remarkable; a few years since, there were none east of the Mississippi. In 1824, a single pair first appeared within the limits of New York, at a tavern near Whitehall, a short distance from Lake Champlain; shortly after Gov. De Witt Clinton introduced them to the world at large by writing a notice of them;
