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It has trees in front and a yard and a garden and a squash court: a sort of tennis you play against the angles of walls covered smooth with cement. Also a studio as large as a theatre. Outside the trees beat on the windows and birds chirp there. The river flows only forty feet away, with great brown barges on it, and gulls whimper and cry, and aeroplane all day.
Just at this moment the teacher entered, and the crestfallen pupils busied themselves in gathering up the scattered books and other articles used in storming the squirrel. "My young visitor is quite shocked by such an exhibition of cruelty," said Miss Harper, when she had learned how matters stood. "Think what the woods would be without the song of birds and the chirp and hum of insects.
It was always immensely amusing to strangers to see Richard, when out in the room, searching with his inquisitive beak in the most hopeless places with a cheerful happy activity, as if he always felt sure that long-looked-for grub, for which he had searched all the years of his life, must be close by, round the corners somewhere, under the penwiper, behind that book, amongst these coloured silks; and if interfered with he would give a peck and a chirp, as much as to say, "Do let me alone, I'm busy; I've got my living to get, and grubs seem scarce."
To this day in Surinam the Dutch call them lyre-players. If there is any truth in the story, the grasshopper then had powers far in advance of his degenerated descendants; for now the grasshopper like the cricket has a chirp consisting of three notes in rhythm, always forming a triplet in the key of B. Gardiner, on the authority of Dr.
"Isn't it queer," she said one day to herself, "that such pretty things can come out of such ugly little things." Nothing in nature seemed to turn away from her, any more than would nature's God. The dumb life around began to speak to her in many and varied voices, and she who fled from companionship with her own kind would sit and chirp and talk to the birds, as if they understood her.
There was not a breath of wind; the sunlight shone down on the bare hillside; the loud chirp of the grasshoppers was the only sound. It was a steep ascent and grew steeper as the valley sank away.
He would laugh sometimes at her pretensions, just as he would have laughed at similar self-assertiveness on the part of any one else with whom he must necessarily be thrown, but never by thought, word or deed had he ever given my Lady Wren the faintest suspicion that he considered her more beautiful, better dressed, or more entertaining, either in song, chirp, flight or plumage, than the flock of other birds about her.
No signs of life occurred near him, but occasionally the melancholy chirp of a cricket, or perhaps the guttural twang of a bullfrog from a neighboring marsh, as if sleeping uncomfortably and turning suddenly in his bed. All the stories of ghosts and goblins that he had heard in the afternoon now came crowding upon his recollection.
It was one of those memorable years of English weather, when some Provençal spell seems wreathed round the island in the northern sea, and the grasshoppers chirp loudly as the cicadas, the hills smell of rosemary, and white walls of the old farmhouses blaze in the sunlight as if they stood in Arles or Avignon or famed Tarascon by Rhone.
Was there no sound in the air, besides the gentle rustling of the trees and the grasshopper's merry chirp? Hark! Something very faint and distant, not unlike the murmuring in a sea-shell. Now it grew louder, fainter now, and now it altogether died away. Presently, it came again, subsided, came once more, grew louder, fainter swelled into a roar. It was on the road, and varied with its windings.
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