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But even with the same audience, the tropical singing-birds would probably be less esteemed than songsters of equal merit in the temperate latitudes; for, amid the stridulous and deafening sounds made by the insects in warm climates, the notes of birds would be scarcely audible.
Nothing is heard but laughter, conversation, songs, and anecdotes, all rising in a loud key, among the louder humming of the spinning-wheels and the stridulous noise of the reeds, as they incessantly crack the cuts in the hands of the reelers, who are perpetually turning them from morning to night, in order to ascertain the quantity which every competitor has spun; and she, of course, who has spun most wins the kemp, and is the queen for the night.
It first manifests itself by a short, dry, croupy cough, and hoarseness of the voice. The first difficulty in breathing usually takes place during the night, and once it begins, it rapidly gets worse. Inspiration becomes noisy, sometimes stridulous or metallic or sibilant, and there is marked indrawing of the epigastrium and lower intercostal spaces.
We observed that the people had placed corn-granaries at different parts of this forest, and had been careful to leave no track to them a provision in case of further visits of Mazitu. King-hunters abound, and make the air resound with their stridulous notes, which commence with a sharp, shrill cheep, and then follows a succession of notes, which resembles a pea in a whistle.
At night they again heard the stridulous clamour of the maleos, and every morning looked out for them; but these fine fowls did not put in another appearance, much less deposit three dozen eggs right under their eyes, and in a convenient spot for being gathered.
"I say, old man, after all, the regular straight-out American style lays over all their foreign flops and fandoodles. I wonder what old Brimmer would say to his wife's full-dress nightgown eh?" But at this moment the long-drawn, slightly stridulous utterances of Mrs. Brimmer rose through the other greetings like a lazy east wind.
She wished to conform to her mother's exigent standard, but she could not, all at once, and be a girl too a girl of sixteen, a little off the key physically, not having come to a woman's repose of movement; a little stridulous mentally, but pulsing with life's dumb music of aspiration; as intense as her mother in feeling, without her mother's power to throw off the strain in words.
"'Put that down, came a hollow and stridulous voice, so unexpected and startling to Pym that he withdrew his hand, allowing the vase to drop back to the floor with a resounding thud.
Again Edmund fired upon it, and again it uttered its stridulous pipe of defiance, or fear, and leaped away in the tangle. We sped in pursuit, and when we came upon it for the third time it had stopped in an opening so narrow that the bow of the air ship almost touched it before we were aware of its presence. This time its prey was no longer visible.
The marrowy organisms, with skins that shed water like the backs of ducks, with smooth surfaces neatly padded beneath, and velvet linings to their singing-pipes, are not so common among us as that other pattern of humanity with angular outlines and plane surfaces, and integuments, hair like the fibrous covering of a cocoa-nut in gloss and suppleness as well as color, and voices at once thin and strenuous, acidulous enough to produce effervescence with alkalis, and stridulous enough to sing duets with the katydids.
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