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There was a moment's pause; then, with a deepening color, she turned to Ben Blair. "Come again soon," she added in a low tone. Summer, tan-colored, musical with note of katydid and cicada, and the constant purr of the south wind, was upon the prairie country. Under the eternal law of necessity, the necessity of sunburnt, stunted grass, the boundaries of the range extended far in every direction.
"I never thought, the day I hauled you into this town," said Joe, his high rasping voice harmonizing well with his surroundings, like a katydid on a dead limb, "you'd be the man to put the kibosh on 'em and close 'em up like you done. I never saw the bottom drop out of no place as quick as it's fell out of this town, and I've saw a good many go up in my day.
The clouds were blowing away from a densely instarred sky; the moon was hardly more than a crescent and dipping low in the west, but he could see the sombre outline of the opposite mountain, and the white mists that shifted in a ghostly and elusive fashion along the summit. The night was still, save for a late katydid, spared by the frost, and piping shrilly.
Tommy Grasshopper, Granpa Tobackyworm, and all the other friends of the Thumbkins came and ate the lovely pancakes, covered with the delicious honey. And, after eating as much as they could, everybody caught hold of hands and danced until late in the night, for the Katydid orchestra was there to furnish the music. A great rough stone lay beneath a gnarled old tree.
Over this valley they had for some time gazed in silence, till now the broad sun sank behind the mountains, and the shrill whistle of the quail, which had been momently audible during the whole afternoon, ceased suddenly; four or five night-hawks might be seen wheeling high in pursuit of their insect prey through the thin atmosphere, and the sharp chirrup of a solitary katydid, the last of its summer tribe, was the only sound that interrupted the faint rush of the rapid stream, which came more clearly on the ear now that the louder noises of busy babbling daylight had yielded to the stillness of approaching night.
A cheery little cricket chirped somewhere in this scene of impending failure; nearby a katydid was grinding out her old familiar song as if it were the latest popular air. In the barn across the yard the discordant sound of the horses kicking the echoing boards sounded clear in the still night and seemed a part of the homely music of the countryside.
I doubt not these sounds are pleasing to the female of the species, for they are always made by the male. The katydid, instead of fiddling in this way, has a sort of drum on the angle of his one wing, which he can rub over a tooth in the corresponding angle of his other wing, thus producing the familiar "katydid" sound.
The lines to the katydid, with "L'Inconnue" "Is thy name Mary, maiden fair?" published in the magazine at about the same time, disclose Holmes's natural melody and his fine instinct for literary form.
In an instant Robert had secured a horrid katydid in his fingers and bore down upon her. Screaming wildly, she fled up the lane, pursued by the avenging glass of form. A quarter of a mile and they returned, she full of apology to the victorious "dude." The rustic mania possessed him unabatedly. "I can do up a cowpenful of you slow hayseeds," he proclaimed, vaingloriously.
"Now you must do a stunt!" shrieked Ray and Gertie; and Carl hesitatingly sang what he remembered of Forrest Haviland's foolish song: "I went up in a balloon so big The people on the earth they looked like a pig, Like a mice, like a katydid, like flieses and like fleasen." Then, without solicitation, Gertie decided to dance "Gather the Golden Sheaves," which she had learned at the school of Mme.
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