BIRDS IN THE CALENDAR 



siderable interest in its own way. It is not to 

 be denied that the churring note of the night- 

 jar is, to ordinary ears, the reverse of at- 

 tractive, and the bird is not much more 

 pleasing to the eye than to the ear ; while the 

 nightingale, on the contrary, produces such 

 sweet sounds as made Izaak Walton marvel 

 what music God could provide for His saints 

 in heaven when He gave such as this to 

 sinners on earth. The suggestion was not 

 wholly his own, since the father of angling 

 borrowed it from a French writer ; but he 

 vastly improved on the original, and the 

 passage will long live in the hearts of thou- 

 sands who care not a jot for his instructions 

 in respect of worms. At the same time, the 

 nightjar, though the less attractive bird of 

 the two, is fully as interesting as its comrade 

 of the summer darkness, and there should be 

 no difficulty in indicating the little that they 

 have in common, as well as much wherein 

 they differ, in both habits and appearance. 



Both, then, are birds of sober attire. Indeed 

 of the two, the nightjar, with its soft and 

 delicately pencilled plumage and the con- 

 spicuous white spots, is perhaps the hand- 

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