about their marauding in
stealthy silence; and it is only in less settled regions that one hears
the jackals barking, the hyaenas howling, and the browsing deer whistling
through the night watches.

There are, however, two of our native birds, or rather summer visitors,
since they leave us in autumn, closely associated with these warm June
nights, the stillness of which they break in very different fashion, and
these are the nightingale and nightjar. Each is of considerable
interest in its own way. It is not to be denied that the churring note
of the nightjar is, to ordinary ears, the reverse of attractive, and the
bird is not much more pleasing to the eye than to the ear; while the
nightingale, on the contrary, produces such sweet sounds as made Izaak
Walton marvel what music God could provide for His saints in heaven when
He gave such as this to sinners on earth. The suggestion was not wholly
his own, since the father of angling borrowed it from a French writer;
but he vastly improved on the original, and the passage will long live
in the hearts of thousands who care not a jot for his instructions in
respect of worms. At the same time, the nightjar, though the less
attractive bird of the two, is fully as interesting as its comrade of
the summer darkness, and there should be no difficulty in indicating the
little that they have in common, as well as much wherein they differ, in
both habits and appearance.

Both, then, are birds of sober attire. Indeed of the two, the nightjar,
with its soft and delicately pencilled plumage and the conspicuous white
spots, is perhaps the handsomer, though, as it is seen only in the
gloaming, its quiet beauty is but little appreciated. The unobtrusive
dress of the nightingale, on the other hand, is familiar in districts in
which the bird abounds, and is commonly quoted, by contrast with its
unrivalled voice, as the converse of the gaudy colouring of raucous
macaws and parrakeets. As has been said, both these birds are summer
migrants, the nightingale arriving on our shores about the middle of
April, the nightjar perhaps a fortnight later. Thenceforth, however,
their programmes are wholly divergent, for, whereas the nightjars
proceed to scatter over the length and breadth of Britain, penetrating
even to Ireland in the west and as far north as the Hebrides, the
nightingale stops far short of these extremes and leaves whole counties
of England, as well as probably the whole of Scotland, a