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 creeping 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 whippoorwills around him, and not stay his steps as one lost in the land of homeless, wailing spirits? The continual shifting of the voices, the mocking echoes, and the hiding darkness combine in an effect altogether gruesome and unearthly.
One may hear the whippoorwill every summer 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 it is not unusual to stumble upon one asleep by day, it is a rare experience to surprise one feeding or singing at night.
One evening I was standing by a pump in an open yard, listening to the whippoorwills as they came out to the edge of the woods and called along the fields. The swamp ran up so close on this side of the house that faint puffs of magnolia and wild grape could be strained pure from the mingling odors in the sweet night air. The whippoorwills were so near that the introductory _chuck_ and many of the finer, flute-like trills of their song, which are never heard at a distance, were clear and distinct. Presently one call sounded out above the others, and instantly rang again, just behind a row of currant-bushes not ten feet away.
I strained my eyes for a glimpse of the creature, when swift wings fanned my face, and a dark, fluffy thing, as soft and noiseless as a shadow, dropped at my feet, and exploded with a triple cry of _Whip-poor-will!_ that startled me. It was a rapid, crackling, vigorous call that split through the night as a streak of lightning through a thunder-cloud. The farmers about here interpret the notes to say, _Crack-the-whip!_ and certainly, near by, this fits better than _Whip-poor-will!_
[Illustration: "It caught at the insects in the air."]