mbering, deeper voiced denizens. The swoon of heat in which
they lay had served to rouse other lives that the frost of the
morning had silenced. There are people who never can hear a
partridge drum. The vibrations are pitched below the register of
their ear. There are others, far more in number who never hear the
shrilling of the pasture insects. Their voices are so thin and
shrill that they are above the common register. Indeed they are
apt to pass the average person as unnoticed as the tick of a clock
in a room where one is accustomed to its presence. I do not know
how long they had been at it, the black night chirping crickets
which now make up for frozen nights by singing all the warm part
of the day, the green day crickets whose note is pitched far
higher, and a dozen other chirping, shrilling things that one
never sees and rarely hears, however numerous and insistent their
voices, unless something forces his attention in that direction
and bids him listen. I think it was the zoon of a cicada which
waked my attention, and once I heard them they seemed to fill the
air with shrieking. If the drum of the partridge is the lowest
pitched note of which the pasture people are capable, surely the
piping of same of these tiny creatures is the highest. It is very
difficult to determine the spot whence comes the pulsing of the
partridge's wings. It is born out of nowhere and reaches your ear
from no particular direction. The shrilling of the pasture insects
is everywhere and it is equally impossible to locate it. They are
veritable spirit voices, these, and fill the spaces among the red
cedars and barberry bushes, the forests of sweet fern and the fox
paths that wind among the berry bushes, with invisible fays and
sprites. Only the tiniest of these could have such shrill tenuous
voices. Having heard them in all their uproar it is even then
difficult to hold your attention on them, more difficult than with
any other pasture or woodland creatures I know. There will be
times when the ear refuses them and it seems as if blank silence
had settled on the whole field, then after a little it will all
come pulsing back to you.

*****

How dependent these disembodied voices are upon the sun is seen
toward nightfall, when the shadows begin to grow long. Where these
fall across the grasses there grow triangles of silence which
travel fast. Oftentimes as the point of one of these progresses
you may locate a chirper by the sudden ceasi