Observe, no man has ever heard me say that it was in the nature of a whippoorwill to sing at any season, but if one lone bird upon a frozen limb away up the mountain gorge in the dead silence of a moonlit winter’s night, should choose to violate its nature and change its graveyard croakings into purling song in harmony with the melodies so sweetly and vociferously vibrating in the heart of its lone, love-lorn auditor, where is the harm? My critics limit their denial to the time of year, and I call my biographers’ attention to the implied admission that the whippoorwill _does_ sing at some other season. I leave them suspended upon the horns of this dilemma of their own brewing (horns are sometimes brewed) and bid them extricate themselves if they can, for I shall not lend a hand, while I pass on to graver meditations. That there were sweet and heavenly harmonies hovering and quavering in that mountain cove that ever-blessed night in the happy long ago, is certain, but whence came they? Was it really the whippoorwill? And even if it were, and its song was of that doleful, screeching soul-rending stridulance that startles ghosts and gives haunts the creeps was it not sweet music to the only ear that heard it? Might it not have been the soul of the fiddle stirred by a mountain breeze to life, getting itself in tune with the frantic transports of the heart against which it lay? They say a soundpost sometimes comes to life, and that all the tuneful sprites that burrow and buzz in the vibrant caverns of a fiddle are set a-humming and a-thrumming when Cupid peeps in at the slit. Who can tell but that this might have been the mellifluous sound that ravished my ear then and is raising such a hullabulloo now? That there was heavenly music in the air that night I take it none will dare dispute, and that the heart of that care-free swain trudging up the echoless cove to swing corners with love the live-long night and lave and slosh his soul in rapturous revels, was tuned to catch its faintest twang and magnify into pealing orchestras of roaring symphonies, and whooping, heavenly harmonies, all living souls will surely admit. What wonder then, that in the tumultuous union of chromatic confusion, when all the lyrics were raving mad with ecstasy, that the croaking of a whippoorwill might have been taken for an angel’s harp or the twittering of a catbird? Thus much for speculation! Thus much in tribute to the harmonies! And now I come to hurl the cold truth slap into the faces of my critics and bid them make the most of it! The types did do me wrong, aided by some unmeant pencil slip along the line between this cushioned sanctum and the cobwebbed den where sits and broods and rends his hair, a careworn proofreader with genius in his dreamy eye and smut upon his classic nose. What I did write was changed, transmogrified, warped, varied, and subverted.