certain minstrels by whom I was sometimes serenaded, who
might be straying over hill and dale; but soon I was not unpleasantly
disappointed when it was prolonged into the cheap and natural music of
the cow. I do not mean to be satirical, but to express my appreciation
of those youths' singing, when I state that I perceived clearly that
it was akin to the music of the cow, and they were at length one
articulation of Nature.

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 had a rare opportunity to become acquainted
with their habits. Sometimes I heard four or five at once in different
parts of the wood, by accident one a bar behind another, and so near me
that I distinguished not only the cluck after each note, but often that
singular buzzing sound like a fly in a spider's web, only proportionally
louder. Sometimes one would circle round and round me in the woods a few
feet distant as if tethered by a string, when probably I was near its
eggs. They sang at intervals throughout the night, and were again as
musical as ever just before and about dawn.

When other birds are still, the screech owls take up the strain, like
mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is truly Ben
Jonsonian. Wise midnight hags! It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who
of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the
mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the
delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear
their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside;
reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the
dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be
sung. They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings,
of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did
the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns
or threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions. They give me a
new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our common
dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! sighs one on
t