FLOCK OF NIGHT-HAWKS. 77 



my hospitable entertainer, he presented me with " The 

 History of the Early Settlement of the Juniata Valley," 

 by U. T. Jones, and dedicated to him by the author. 

 The work is very nicely got up ; but I regret to have 

 met with in its pages a bitterness of expression towards 

 " the old country " which ought never to appear, and 

 which, I trust, by this time has been entirely obliterated 

 in " the new " by the consideration of the very obvious 

 interests which should bind the two nations together. 



On leaving the hospitable residence of Major Bell we 

 repaired to the railway station in the woods, there to 

 await our train, and in the red glare of the evening sky of 

 that most charming sunset I became intensely amused by 

 the sudden appearance of a hundred or more of the com 

 mon night-hawk or goat-sucker (such as we have in Eng 

 land), which, rising high in air, occupied themselves with 

 a manner of flight very like that of swallows in catching 

 insects ; and their graceful evolutions were confined to the 

 region immediately around and above us. Burnet and my 

 self having differed or doubted as to the height of their 

 flight, we waited for those that came immediately over our 

 heads, and fired several shots at them. My luggage having 

 arrived the night before, I had then in my hand one of my 

 old favourite John Manton guns of the eleven gauge, and 

 I still think that if I had had a cartridge of No. 3 shot I 

 could have killed some of these birds, even at the height at 

 which they were ; but with loose shot, and even with 

 Burnet' s enormous wild-fowl gun, we failed to bring one 

 down. The train then arrived and we returned to Altoona, 

 and having ordered George to clean my gun-, for the first 

 time I became aware that a traveller in America bent on 

 sport ought always to carry tow as well as sweet oil with 

 him. At Altoona there was no tow to be procured, and 



