II
You ought to hear the lively clatter of a mowing-machine. It is hot out of doors; the roads are beginning to look dusty; the insects are tuning up in the grass, and, like their chorus all together, and marching round and round the meadow, moves the mower’s whirring blade. I love the sound. Haying is hard, sweet work. The farmer who does not love his haying ought to be made to keep a country store and sell kerosene oil and lumps of dead salt pork out of a barrel. He could not appreciate a live, friendly pig.
Down the long swath sing the knives, the cogs click above the square corners, and the big, loud thing sings on again,—the song of “first-fruits,” the first great ingathering of the season,—a song to touch the heart with joy and sweet solemnity.
III
You ought to hear the Katydids—two of them on the trees outside your window. They are not saying “Katy did,” nor singing “Katy did”; they are fiddling “Katy did,” “Katy didn’t”—by rasping the fore wings.
Is the sound “Katy” or “Katy did”? or what is said? Count the notes. Are they at the rate of two hundred per minute? Watch the instrumentalist—till you make sure it is the male who is wooing Katy with his persistent guitar. The male has no long ovipositors.
IV
Another instrumentalist to hear is the big cicada or “harvest-fly.” There is no more characteristic sound of all the summer than his big, quick, startling whirr—a minute mowing-machine up on the limb overhead! Not so minute either, for the creature is fully two inches long, with bulging eyes and a click to his wings when he flies that can be heard a hundred feet away! “Dog-days-z-z-z-z-z-z-z” is the song he sings to me.