THE POORWILL. - 
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of the bordering wilderness made vocal in appeal to the romantic spirit of 
youth. Poor Will! Poor Will! you think upon cities, actions, achievements ; 
think rather upon solitude, upon quietness, upon lonely devotions. Come, oh, 
come to the wilderness, to the mystic, silent, fateful wastes! And ever after, 
even tho duty call him to the city, to the stupid, stifling, roaring, (and glori- 
ous) city, the voice of the Poor-will has wrought its work within the heart of 
the exiled farmer boy, and he owns a reverence for the silent places, a loyalty 
of affection for the wilderness, which not all the forced subservience of things 
which creak or blare or shriek may fully efface. 
The Poor-will spends the day sleeping on the ground under the shelter of 
a sage-bush, or close beside some lichen-covered rock, to which its intricate 
pattern of plumage marvelously assimilates. When startled, by day, the bird 
flits a few yards over the sage-tops and plumps down at haphazard. If it 
chances to settle in the full sunlight, it appears to be blinded and may allow a 
close approach; but if in the shade, one is not likely to surprise it again. Even 
after nightfall these fairy moth-catchers are much more terrestrial in their 
habits than are the Nighthawks. They alight upon the ground upon the slight- 
est pretext and, indeed, appear most frequently to attain their object by leap- 
ing up at passing insects. They are more strictly nocturnal in habit, also, than 
the Night Jars, and we know of their later movements only thru the inter- 
mittent exercise of song. Heard in some starlit canon, the passing of a Poor- 
will in full ery is an indescribable experience, producing feelings somewhere 
between pleasure and fear,—pleasure in the delightful melancholy of the notes 
heard in the dim distance, but something akin to terror at the near approach 
and thrilling climax of the portentous sounds. 
Taken in the hand, one sees what a quiet, inoffensive fay the Poor-will is, 
all feathers and itself a mere featherweight. The silken sheen and delicate 
tracery of the frost-work upon the plumage it were hopeless to describe. It is 
as tho some fairy snowball had struck the bird full on the forehead, and from 
thence gone shivering with ever lessening traces all over the upperparts. Or, 
perhaps, to allow another fancy, the dust of the innumerable moth-millers, 
with which the bird is always wrestling, gets powdered over its garments. 
The large bristles which line the upper mandible, and which increase the catch- 
ing capacity of the extensive gape by half, are seen to be really modified feath- 
ers, and not hairs, as might be supposed, for in younger specimens they are 
protected by little horny basal sheaths. With this equipment, and wings, our 
melancholy hero easily becomes the envy of mere human entomologists. 
