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Updated: June 21, 2025
It is then that one hears the short, sharp bark of the jackals, the weird howl of migrating families of flying-foxes, the ceaseless hooting of several species of owls, one of which is known as the devil-bird because of its uncanny scream, the croaking of tree-toads and mammoth crickets, mingled with the frequent, distressful cry of some other night bird whose name is unknown, it is heard but not seen.
They were as always, just as we should see them when the evening was warm and the tree-toads chirped clearly audible at half a mile. The importance of the tempest shrank. Then below them next we noticed the mountains; they too were serene and calm. Immediately it was as though the storm were an hallucination; something not objective; something real, but within the soul of him who looked upon it.
The night's silence was broken by a multitude of sounds the laboured breathing of the spent bronco, the saddle creaking as the dripping flanks rose and fell, the touch of wind in the tree-tops and the chorusing of the myriad tree-toads.
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.
I could not discover the toad, but was so convinced that it was concealed in the tree, that I stopped up the hole, determined to return with an axe, when I had time, and cut the trunk open. A week elapsed before I again went to the woods, when, on cutting into the cavity of the tree, I found a pair of tree-toads, male and female, and a large, shelless snail.
At night other sounds are heard, less agreeable to the ear: the shrill "chirrup" of cicadas and tree-toads ringing so incessantly, that only when they cease do you become conscious of their existence; the dull "gluck-gluck" of the great bullfrog; the sharp cries of the heron and qua-bird; and the sepulchral screech of the great horned owl.
The tree-toads, beginning their nightly chorus from the wet places below the cottonwoods, emphasized the dreariness of the recital, the ancient hopelessness of the weak beneath the heel of the oppressor. Dement ceased speaking and stood in silhouette against the last yellow-and-black of the dead sunset. The protruding apple in his hawk-like throat worked up and down grotesquely.
All eyes were eagerly fixed on the low wooded hills which slept in the moonlight, spangled by fireflies, with a million dancing stars; all nostrils drank greedily the fragrant air, which swept from the land, laden with the scent of a thousand flowers; all ears welcomed, as a grateful change from the monotonous whisper and lap of the water, the hum of insects, the snore of the tree-toads, the plaintive notes of the shore-fowl, which fill a tropic night with noisy life.
But they listened in vain. The lazy tree-toads sang, the monotonous hum of the night went on. Gabriel Bennet held the hand of Little Malacca a dark-eyed boy, who was supposed in the school to have had no father or mother, and who had instinctively attached himself to Gabriel from the moment they met. "Isn't it dreadful?" whispered the latter.
And she shows the window, open on the blackness of the savage country from which ascends an immense silence, with, from time to time, the noise of spring, intermittent musical notes of crickets and tree-toads. Hearing her talk so quietly, Ramuntcho feels confounded by this renunciation of all things; she appears to him still more irrevocably changed, far-off poor little nun!
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