The gardens are appropriately favourite haunts of the nightingales on their return with the season of gladness from their winter resorts in the woods of the Caspian coast.

The Persian poets tell of the passionate love of the nightingale for the scented rose, and in fanciful figure of speech make the full-blossomed flower complain of too much kissing from its bird-lover, so that its sweetness goes, and its beauty fades far too sadly soon.

The boys told me of the number of family pairs, their nests and eggs, and said that they took the young male birds when fully fledged and about to leave the nest, and brought them up by hand at first, till able to feed themselves.

There is a great demand in the towns for the young nightingales, which in Persia sing well in captivity, so rarely the case with the bird in Europe.

The shopkeepers like to have their pet birds by them, and in the nesting season they may be heard all over the bazaars, singing sweetly and longingly for the partners they know of by instinct, but never meet.
There is much pleasing romance and sentiment in the popular idea regarding the origin of the national emblem, Sher o Khurshed (the Lion and the Sun).