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Moonlight fools a feller the worst kind. I throwed a stone at a whippoor-will as was perched on the roof a-keepin' us all awake nights, and would yuh believe me, she went right through the winder of the attic, kersmash. Never was more surprised in my life. And you don't ketch me heavin' stones by moonlight agin." From one subject they drifted to another.

It was just a night when things should have been lively there a perfect night for ha'nting. I called for Robert. I listened. He never answered. I heard only a bull-frog a-bellering in the pond, a whippoor-will whistling in the grove, and a dog howling at the moon. From Tales of the Tenements, by Eden Phillpotts. Published in America by John Lane Company, and in England by John Murray.

It always seems to me that the night hunters of pasture and woodland bewail the passing of such a night as much as I do. The whippoor-will began to voice his petulant wistfulness again. He had been silent for hours, feasting I dare say on myriad moths and unable to call with his mouth full. The whippoor-will chants matins as querulously as he does vespers.

The firefly of the tropics is more spectacular. He blazes forth like a meteor, setting all the thicket aglow for a moment. The lights of our fireflies are more like a frosting of the darkness, as when the moon shines in winter and the light glints from ice crystals hung on the frozen grass. I like ours best. The herald of the moon is the whippoor-will.

The whippoor-will saw it, too, and began his call, which I do not find a melancholy plaint, but rather an eager asking. It was a voice of shrill longing, sounding out of luminous loneliness after the moon began to silver all things.