It is little wonder that so many legends and 

 omens follow the whippoorwill. How could our 

 imaginations, with a bent for superstition, fail 

 to work upon a creature so often heard, so rarely 

 seen, of habits so dark and uncanny ? 



One cannot grow accustomed to the night. The 

 eager, jostling, open-faced day has always been 

 familiar ; but with the night, though she comes 

 as often as the day, no number of returns can 

 make us acquainted. Whatever is peculiarly 

 her own shares her mystery. Who can get used 

 to the bats flitting and squeaking about him in 

 the dusk ? Or who can keep his flesh from creep- 

 ing when an owl bobs over him in the silence 

 against a full moon? Or who, in the depths of a 

 pine barren, can listen to a circle of whippoor- 

 wills around him, and not stay his steps as one 

 lost in the land of homeless, wailing spirits'? 

 The continual shifting of the voices, the mock- 

 ing echoes, and the hiding darkness combine in 

 an effect altogether gruesome and unearthly. 



One may hear the whippoorwill every sum- 

 mer of his life, but never see the bird. It is shy 

 and wary, and, with the help of the darkness, 

 manages to keep strangely out of sight. Though 

 [69] 



