I LIGHT THE FRAGRANT FIRE. 125 



the females. This may be to spy out the land and 

 prepare a reception for the females ; but at all events 

 there they are, flooding the meadows with melody, 

 sometimes a week in advance of their partners. How 

 they come, or whence they come, nobody knows ; but 

 you wake up some fine morning in May, and your 

 senses are tingled by the tinkling of the first bobolink. 



The scissorstails do not sing, but confine their 

 energies to ridding the lowlands of files and mosqui- 

 toes. During the heat of the day they were unseen, 

 but always appeared just half an hour before sunset, 

 alighting upon a wild tamarind tree and thence mak- 

 ing aerial forays upon the insects. This was only 

 at evening time ; at early morning I might find them 

 in open glades of the woods for an hour or so after 

 daylight, then they would disappear. Their feeding 

 time seemed to be toward sunset, as in the morning 

 they were hovering over the shrubs and grasses of 

 the glades, seemingly with aimless fiight. 



Of the many birds that clear the air of noxious in- 

 sects, these fiycatchers and the night hawks are the 

 most efficacious, in a quiet, unobtrusive way. In por- 

 tions of the United States the night hawk is known as 

 the " bull bat," from its rapid circhng in the air and 

 from the roaring noise it makes with its wings, in swift 

 descent. This, the most inoffensive of birds, is well 

 known throughout the West Indies as the " jumby 

 bird," or the ''jomby" — bird of ill omen — because 

 of its soft flight, ghostlike wanderings, and nocturnal 

 habits. It is rarely abroad by day, though I once shot 

 one at dusk. It is the most maligned of birds, and 



