THE NIGHT-JAR. 



itself before us. And, as usual, art had 

 reacted upon nature. The cry, that was 

 so beautiful and romantic in itself, gained 

 an added touch of beauty and romance from 

 the great word-painter's exquisite images. 



Perhaps, too, some part of the charm 

 in the night-jar and his kind may be due 

 to the sense that here at least we stand 

 face to face with a genuine relic of the older, 

 the wilder, and the freer England. He is 

 a bird of the night, of the heather and the 

 bracken, of the unbroken waste, of the 

 unpeopled solitude. When man invades 

 his high home, he moves afield before the 

 intruder. Here on the great moors we hear 

 him nightly in summer ; but only when no 

 other sound assails the ear, save the boom 

 of the cockchafer, and the myriad hum of 

 the flies and moths of dusk among the 

 heather. He belongs, in fact, to that elder 

 fauna which inhabited England before the 

 whirr of wheels and the snort of steam drove 

 the wild things far from us. The perky 



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