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Yet perhaps with sunflowers and cicadae, summer and winter, cattle, wife and family, the settler may create a full and various existence. One person at least I saw upon the plains who seemed in every way superior to her lot. This was a woman who boarded us at a way station, selling milk.
When flying, it is the only portion of the insect seen; and birds trying to capture it on the wing are likely to get only a mouthful of the flocculent wax. The large Homoptera are much preyed upon by birds. In April, when the Cicadae are piping their shrill cry from morning until night, individuals are often seen whose bulky bodies have been bitten off from the thorax by some bird.
To eat Cicadae and sugar is not possible in every part of the country. In the north, where she abounds, the Green Grasshopper would not find the dish which attracts her so strongly here. She must have other resources. The Beetle is accepted without hesitation. Nothing is left of him but the wing-cases, head and legs. These examples teach us enough.
These Japanese tree crickets are much more extraordinary singers than even the wonderful cicadae of the tropics; and they are much less tiresome, for there is a different species of semi, with a totally different song, for almost every month during the whole warm season. There are, I believe, seven kinds; but I have become familiar with only four.
The minminzemi is followed, early in autumn, by a beautiful green semi, the higurashi, which makes a singularly clear sound, like the rapid ringing of a small bell, kana-kana-kan a-kana- kana. But the most astonishing visitor of all comes still later, the tsukiu-tsukiu-boshi. I fancy this creature can have no rival in the whole world of cicadae its music is exactly like the song of a bird.
In passing through some parts where a good shower of rain has fallen, the stridulous piercing notes of the cicadae are perfectly deafening; a drab-colored cricket joins the chorus with a sharp sound, which has as little modulation as the drone of a Scottish bagpipe. I could not conceive how so small a thing could raise such a sound; it seemed to make the ground over it thrill.
The songs of the Honen-odori, or harvest dances, with their curious choruses; the chants of the Bon-odori, which differ in every district; the strange snatches of song, often sweet and weird, that one hears from the rice-fields or the mountain slopes in remote provinces, have qualities totally different from those we are accustomed to associate with the idea of Japanese music, a charm indisputable even for Western ears, because not less in harmony with the nature inspiring it than the song of a bird or the shrilling of cicadae.
He longed to return; to find himself once more among his dear insects; to see his grey olive-trees, full of the frolicsome cicadae, his wastes and commons, which smelt so sweet of thyme and cypress; above all, to return to his furnace and retorts, in order to complete his discovery as quickly as possible. But others profited by his happy conceptions. "the bark Tender and juicy, of the bough,"
When cicadae, crickets, and frogs unite, their music may be heard at the distance of a quarter of a mile. A tree attracted my attention as new, the leaves being like those of an acacia, but the ends of the branches from which they grew resembled closely oblong fir-cones. The corn-poppy was abundant, and many of the trees, flowering bulbs, and plants were identical with those in Pungo Andongo.
Only, the Epeira's wallet, instead of seeds, holds eggs. The difference is more apparent than real, for egg and grain are one. How will this living fruit, ripening in the heat beloved of the Cicadae, manage to burst? How, above all, will dissemination take place? They are there in their hundreds.
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