back, and bobbed and shook his head when the bitter east wind was blowing.  The nest interested me, and I visited it every day from the time the first stained turquoise sphere was laid in the warm lining of moss and horse-hair, till, when I chirped, four red hungry throats, eager for worm or slug, opened out of a confused mass of feathery down.  What a hungry brood it was, to be sure, and how often father and mother were put to it to provide them sustenance!  I went but the other day to have a peep, and, behold! brood and parent-birds were gone, the nest was empty, Adam’s visitors had departed.  In the corners of my bedroom window I have a couple of swallows’ nests, and nothing can be pleasanter in these summer mornings than to lie in a kind of half-dream, conscious all the time of the chatterings and endearments of the man-loving creatures.  They are beautifully restless, and are continually darting around their nests in the window-corners.  All at once there is a great twittering and noise; something of moment has been witnessed, something of importance has occurred in the swallow-world,—­perhaps a fly of unusual size or savour has been bolted.  Clinging with their feet, and with heads turned charmingly aside, they chatter away with voluble sweetness, then with a gleam of silver they are gone, and in a trice one is poising itself in the wind above my tree-tops, while the other dips her wing as she darts after a fly through the arches of the bridge which lets the slow stream down to the sea.  I go to the southern wall, against which I have trained my fruit-trees, and find it a sheet of white and vermeil blossom; and as I know it by heart, I can notice what changes take place on it day by day, what later clumps of buds have burst into colour and odour.  What beauty in that blooming wall! the wedding-presents of a princess ranged for admiration would not please me half so much; what delicate colouring! what fragrance the thievish winds steal from it, without making it one odour the poorer! with what a complacent hum the bee goes past!  My chaffinch’s nest, my swallows,—­twittering but a few months ago around the kraal of the Hottentot, or chasing flies around the six solitary pillars of Baalbec,—­with their nests in the corners of my bed-room windows, my long-armed fruit-trees flowering against my sunny wall, are not mighty pleasures, but then they are my own, and I have not to go in search of them.  And so, like a wise man, I am content with what I have, and make it richer by my fancy, which is as cheap as sunlight, and gilds objects quite as prettily.  It is the coins in my own pocket, not the coins in the pockets of my neighbour, that are of use to me.  Discontent has never a doit in her purse, and envy is the most poverty stricken of the passions.