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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