dusk and sat on a log about twenty or thirty feet
from our cabin door and began shouting "Whip poor Will! Whip poor
Will!" with loud emphatic earnestness. "What's that? What's that?" we
cried when this startling visitor first announced himself. "What do
you call it?"

"Why, it's telling you its name," said the Yankee. "Don't you hear it
and what he wants you to do? He says his name is 'Poor Will' and he
wants you to whip him, and you may if you are able to catch him." Poor
Will seemed the most wonderful of all the strange creatures we had
seen. What a wild, strong, bold voice he had, unlike any other we had
ever heard on sea or land!

A near relative, the bull-bat, or nighthawk, seemed hardly less
wonderful. Towards evening scattered flocks kept the sky lively as
they circled around on their long wings a hundred feet or more above
the ground, hunting moths and beetles, interrupting their rather slow
but strong, regular wing-beats at short intervals with quick quivering
strokes while uttering keen, squeaky cries something like _pfee_,
_pfee_, and every now and then diving nearly to the ground with a loud
ripping, bellowing sound, like bull-roaring, suggesting its name;
then turning and gliding swiftly up again. These fine wild gray
birds, about the size of a pigeon, lay their two eggs on bare ground
without anything like a nest or even a concealing bush or grass-tuft.
Nevertheless they are not easily seen, for they are colored like the
ground. While sitting on their eggs, they depend so much upon not
being noticed that if you are walking rapidly ahead they allow you to
step within an inch or two of them without flinching. But if they see
by your looks that you have discovered them, they leave their eggs or
young, and, like a good many other birds, pretend that they are sorely
wounded, fluttering and rolling over on the ground and gasping as if
dying, to draw you away. When pursued we were surprised to find that
just when we were on the point of overtaking them they were always
able to flutter a few yards farther, until they had led us about a
quarter of a mile from the nest; then, suddenly getting well, they
quietly flew home by a roundabout way to their precious babies or
eggs, o'er a' the ills of life victorious, bad boys among the worst.
The Yankee took particular pleasure in encouraging us to pursue them.

Everything about us was so novel and wonderful that we could hardly
believe our senses except when hungry or