Crossword-Solution: NIGHTJAR 8 letters, 18 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 19

She is still as real to me as the stars,--and, alas, as far away! I think no thought that does not fly to her, I have no joys I do not share with her, I tell her when the spring is here, and we sit beneath the moon and listen to the nightjar together.

From these reflections I was roused by the plaintive three-syllable call of an evening bird--a nightjar common in these woods; and was surprised to find that the sun had set, and the woods already shadowed with the twilight.

How different the nights had seemed when I was without shelter, before I had rediscovered fire! How had I endured it? That strange ghostly gloom of the woods at night-time full of innumerable strange shapes; still and dark, yet with something seen at times moving amidst them, dark and vague and strange also--an owl, perhaps, or bat, or great winged moth, or nightjar.

Then memory, like the nightjar on the pine, And sightless hope, a woodlark in night sky, Joined notes of Death and Life till night’s decline Of Death, of Life, those inwound notes are mine.

For him the Bat is a Rat that has grown wings; the Cuckoo is a Sparrow-hawk retired from business; the Slug is a Snail who has lost his shell with the advance of years; the Nightjar (Known also as the Goatsucker, because of the mistaken belief that the bird sucks the milk of Goats, and, in America, as the Whippoorwill.--Translator's Note.), the Chaoucho-grapaou, as he calls her, is an elderly Toad, who, becoming enamoured of milk-food, has grown feathers, so that she may enter the byres and milk the Goats.