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Before the house are the shady plane-trees, where during the burning hours of August the cicada of the flowering ash, the deafening cacan, concealed beneath the leaves, fills the hot atmosphere with its eager cries, the only sound that disturbs the profound silence of this solitude.
Presently the moon would shed her bland benediction over all the scene, and the palisades would draw sharp-pointed shadows on the dark interior slope, and beside each cannon the similitude of another great gun would be mounted; a pearly glister would intimate where the river ran between the dense glossy foliage of the primeval woods, and only the voice of the chanting cicada, or the long dull drone of the frogs, or the hooting of an owl, would come from the deserted village, lying there so still and silent, guarded by the guns of the fort.
The shrill, never ceasing whir of the cicada hardly attracted our attention; while the whistle and crash of a monkey that was inspecting us from his perch among the trees above caused me to peer upward, in hopes of catching a glimpse of his grayish outlines. I had not had an opportunity of asking my companion for the details of his tragic story.
The strident scrapings of the Cicada of the Ash, the Carcan of the district, lend their rhythm to the one note symphony of the common cicada. This is the moment: come along! And, for five or six weeks, oftenest in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, I set myself to explore the flinty plateau.
"I could put a name to nearly every musician at work in Nature's orchestra yonder." "What was that horrible cry?" I whispered. "Jaguar or puma?" "Neither, my boy; only a heron or crane somewhere up the stream." "That snorting croak, then?" "Only frogs or toads, Nat; and that chirruping whirring is something in the cricket or cicada way.
Now if we compare these early stages of mites and myriopods with those of the true six-footed insects, as in the larval Meloë, Cicada, Thrips and Dragon fly, we shall see quite plainly that they all share a common form. What does this mean?
I was dozing quietly, glad to escape for an instant the insistent screaming of a cicada which seemed to have gone mad in the heat, when a low rustling caught my ear a sound of moving leaves without wind; the voice of a breeze in the midst of breathless heat. There was in it something sinister and foreboding.
This little thorn-like tree-hopper and all of its queer harlequin tribe are near relatives to the buzzing cicada, or harvest-fly, whose whizzing din in the dog-days has won it the popular misnomer of "locust."
It was a large morsel, and the mother seemed to have doubts of her chick's ability to dispose of it, for she stood near and watched its efforts with great solicitude. The young bird struggled valiantly with the cicada, but made no head way in swallowing it, when the mother took it from him and flew to the sidewalk, and proceeded to break and bruise it more thoroughly.
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