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Updated: May 25, 2025
Two whip-poor-wills were uttering their insistent note, hidden somewhere among the thick foliage of the maple and basswood trees that towered above the spring down behind the house where the Ballards lived. The sky in the west still glowed with amber light, and the crescent moon floated like a golden boat above the horizon's edge.
It seemed to promise happiness and love but it never come for us. It makes me dream of the past now just as it did of the future then; an' the whip-poor-wills, too " The night was perfectly beautiful, such a night as makes dying an infinite sorrow. The summer was at its liberalest. Innumerable insects of the nocturnal sort were singing in unison with the frogs in the pools.
Night came abruptly the swift Southern darkness quickly emblazoned with stars; and the whip-poor-wills began their ghostly calling; and the spectres of the mist crept stealthily inland. "Celia?" Her soft voice answered from the darkness near him. He said: "I knew this was her room before you told me. I have seen her several times." "Good God, Phil!" she faltered, "what are you saying?"
"That's a big bird too." "Crane?" said the captain, with an incredulous snort. "No, sir," said the American: "different thing altogether. It's a night bird that flies round catching beetles and moths bird something like our `Whip-poor-Wills' or `Chuck-Will's-widows." "Bah!" said the captain.
Sleeping a-nights where waters murmur, wolves howl, and panthers scream in your hearing; and whip-poor-wills sing till morning comes, and Nature appears in her gladness and pride! Who would not enjoy a scene like that for a season, forgetting the tame monotony of towns, and imprisonment of cities? Who would not forsake a room amid walls of brick for a green woodland parlor?
Regularly at half-past seven, in one part of the summer, after the evening train had gone by, the whip-poor-wills chanted their vespers for half an hour, sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the ridge-pole of the house. They would begin to sing almost with as much precision as a clock, within five minutes of a particular time, referred to the setting of the sun, every evening.
"I beg your pardon, Jenny Wren," said Peter very humbly. "Of course Whip-poor-will has whiskers if you say so. By the way, do the Whip-poor-wills do any better in the matter of a nest than the Nighthawks?" "Not a bit," replied Jenny Wren. "Mrs. Whip-poor-will lays her eggs right on the ground, but usually in the Green Forest where it is dark and lonesome. Like Mrs. Nighthawk, she lays only two.
Some distance along the road two men were hurriedly driving. The breeze carried this sound to her quick ears and, gently lowering the mountaineer's head, she went to the door. The whip-poor-wills abruptly hushed, for they, too, had caught the sound; and amidst that strained expectancy of woods life, which grows so tense as daylight fails, she waited.
Whip-poor-wills accompanied him in his wanderings, Bob Whites, Nightingales; and lazy ebon negroes, musical as birds, sang lilting Southern songs on the way to the tinkle of banjo and guitar. The negroes were not so kind as the birds. From them he suffered humiliation. More than once he was dubbed "Po' white!" by some haughty ebon creature from whose mouth he was supposedly taking the bread.
I'd drive 'em to the corral and pen 'em every evening, and then cook my corn-bread and mutton and coffee, and lie down in a tent the size of a table-cloth, and listen to the coyotes and whip-poor-wills singing around the camp. "The fifth evening, after I had corralled my costly but uncongenial muttons, I walked over to the ranch-house and stepped in the door. "'Mr.
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