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Updated: June 19, 2025
As he passed the end of a narrow court near the railway station, the gleam of his silver mounted malacca attracted the attention of a couple of loafers who were leaning one on either side of an iron pillar in the shadow of the unsavory alley. Not another pedestrian was in sight, and only the remote night-sounds of London broke the silence.
She was still in her riding clothes, her head bare with its ribbon half untied in the nape of her slender neck. The tree-toads were singing off by the springhouse and the cattle in the big corrals made the low, ceaseless night-sounds common to a herd. The riders were gone, the vaqueros were at their posts around the resting stock, the low adobe house was settling into the quiet of the night.
His wife joined him after a moment, and the two walked slowly to and fro together, talking in low tones, while the soft summer darkness gathered closer and closer, and the pleasant night-sounds woke, cricket and katydid and the distant whippoorwill filling the air with a cheerful murmur. Long, long sat Hildegarde at the window, thinking more deeply than she had ever thought in her life before.
Both men listened intently, and presently one of them made out a very faint and distant noise, that did not seem to blend in with the other night-sounds. "Might be a native drum?" he hazarded. "No, 'tain't!" said the other. "I got it now. It's a horse galloping. Tired horse, by the sound of him, and coming this way. All right, Sergeant."
True, there were the usual night-sounds of the country the whir of night-birds, the buzzing of insects, the barking of distant dogs, the mellow lowing of far-off kine but these didn't seem to break the stillness, they only intensified it, and added a grewsome melancholy to it into the bargain.
The vague, untrodden forest behind them, where the night-sounds of the wild dimly reechoed now and then, filled them with indefinable emotions. And that night sleep was slow in coming. Each realized that, despite all calculations and all skill, the morrow might be their last day of life.
The pleasant night-sounds are begun; the hylas are uttering their shrill peep from the meadows, mingled soon with hoarser toads, who take to the water at this season to deposit their spawn. The tree-toads soon join them; but one listens in vain for bullfrogs, or katydids, or grasshoppers, or whippoorwills, or crickets: we must wait for them until the delicious June.
The night-sounds were strangely musical. Cries that were discordant in the day mingled now with the running of distant water, the last notes of some bird before it slept, the measured harmony of a far-away bell, the gentle rustle of some arrival in the thickets; the voice that could not be heard in the noisy chatter of the day rose softly now in a little song of the night and the dark trees and the silver firelight of the stars.
I called again and again, and waited for some response; and heard only the familiar night-sounds voices of insect and bird and tinkling tree-frog, and a low murmur in the topmost foliage, moved by some light breath of wind unfelt below.
Ham heard them all and to him they were like the wretched echoes of a jail where the small clicking night-sounds creep into dreams and poison them with reminders of confinement. His brain was hot with a fever of restiveness and beyond his cell-like room he saw the world from which he was barred: the world which the tongueless voice in his heart kept heralding to him as his own world to conquer.
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