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When the tension of the sun began to slacken and the heat to abate; when the wind vaguely flapped the folds of the flag with a drowsing murmur, as if from out of sleep; when the chirr of the cicada from the woods grew vibratory and strident, suggestive of the passing of the day's meridian, and heralding the long, drowsy lengths of the afternoon to come, the little boat, with that bright touch of scarlet, shot out from behind the wooded bend of the river, and in a few minutes was beached on the gravel and Stuart was within the gates of Fort Loudon.

The principal objection to them is that they are rather too short to bear repetition for half an hour as is the custom, there is another music going on a music that cannot be written and will be difficult to describe I mean the song of the "Cicada Stridulantia" in walnut trees above me.

But the Wasp dragged the Cicada up the trunk of another tree, then took another long sloping flight as before. One more climb and skid down, brought her to her den a hole in a bank that she had dug out; that is why she is called the Digger Wasp. The passage was a foot long and had a crook in the middle. At the end was a round room an inch and a half high.

Tansillo Thou dost well conclude that poetry is not born in rules, or only slightly and accidentally so: the rules are derived, from the poetry, and there are as many kinds and sorts of true rules as there are kinds and sorts of true poets. Cicada How then are the true poets to be known?

While spade and hoe were being brought to dig him out, another hornet appeared, heavy-laden with some prey, and flew humming up and down and around the place where I was standing. I withdrew a little, when he quickly alighted upon one of the mounds of earth, and I saw him carrying into his den no less an insect than the cicada or harvest-fly.

It did not reach half way to the zenith, however; the sky above was blue, of such a depth and transparency, that to gaze upward was like looking into eternity. Then how softly and soothingly the twilight came on! How deep a hush sank on the chesnut glades, broken only by the song of the cicada, chirping its "good-night carol!"

There are a number of natural sounds that resemble more or less closely the most unbirdlike note of this warbler cicada, rattlesnake, and some batrachians.

Whence came the correspondence between this beautiful shy creature and the moist, dark nooks, shot through with stray and transitory sunlight, where it dwells? The analogy is as unmistakable as that between the scorching heats of summer and the shrill cry of the cicada.

Old alders had plunged their roots deep into the banks of the river, and wherever the sunshine struck upon the upper leaves was a cicada scratching out its monotonous note in joyous frenzy. A long range of densely-wooded, rocky cliffs now stretched along the right bank; but I, keeping to the road on the other side, soon left the stream and rose upon a hill dotted with low juniper bushes.

Grass grows now, as it did then, between the round stones; and in the towering sycamores of the reddened brick sidewalk the long, quavering note of the cicada parts the wide summer noonday silence.