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Updated: June 21, 2025
I'm very sensitive." And he looked away with smiling eyes to where the deep black shadows fell prone into the Valley from the forbidding face of the great Wall. Only the towering peaks were alight with crimson and gold, which haloed their bulk in majestic mystery. Night was coming fast across Lost Valley, while the tree-toads out by the springhouse set up their nightly chorus.
"I expect that was a screech-owl, Lizzie," interrupted Laura. "They come out only at night." "Goodness to gracious! Do they come out every night?" demanded the girl. "I expect so." "And them frogs?" "They are tree-toads. Yes, they are here all summer, I guess." "Goodness to gracious! And folks like to live in the woods? Well!"
Whether the shovel, becoming hot among the live coals, burned the owl that was high in the tree-top outside, according to the countryside superstition, or whether by a singular coincidence, he discovered that he had business elsewhere, he was soon gone, and the night was left to the chorusing katydids and tree-toads and to the weird, fitful illuminations of the noiseless heat lightning.
"When we first came here" remarked Tom, "mother could not sleep for the noise they and the tree-toads made." "The voice of the tree-toad is very loud for so small a creature, but the katydid has really no voice at all." "No voice, uncle?" "No, Annie; the chirp of all kinds of grasshoppers is produced by their thighs rubbing against their wing-cases."
The never-ceasing murmur of the waters tended to lull us to sleep in spite of the strange sounds which ever and anon came from the forest, caused by tree-toads and crickets; while occasionally owls, goat-suckers, and frogs joined in the concert with their hooting, wailing, and hoarse croaks. My faithful dog True had taken up his usual place at night below my hammock.
All this is very well; but next morning the newspaper nips these early buds of sentiment. The telegraph announces, "Twenty feet of snow at Ogden, on the Pacific Road; winds blowing a gale at Omaha, and snow still falling; mercury frozen at Duluth; storm-signals at Port Huron." Where now are your tree-toads, your young love, your early season?
For it was that hushed hour of betwixt and between, when crickets, tree-toads and other little creatures of the darkness have wearied themselves to rest; yet also before the daylight life has stirred from its own deep sleep.
It is most unusual weather for the season: it is so every year. The delusion is complete, when, on a mild evening, the tree-toads open their brittle-brattle chorus on the edge of the pond. The citizen asks his neighbor, "Did you hear the frogs last night?" That seems to open the new world. One thinks of his childhood and its innocence, and of his first loves.
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.
After dinner they would sit together on the veranda, watching the moon rise over the rim of that wonderful valley, listening to the tree-toads in noisy convention or hearkening to the "plunk" of a trout leaping in the river below. Hardly a breath of air stirred in the valley. All was peace. It was an Eden.
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