Presumptuous declaration! The female Cricket does not run to hide herself in the folds of her lettuce leaves; but she lifts the curtain a little, and looks out, and wishes to be seen:—
Et fugit ad salices, et se cupit ante videri.
She flies towards the brake, but hopes first to be perceived, said the poet of the delightful eclogue, two thousand years ago. Sacred provocations of lovers, are they not in all ages the same?
CHAPTER XI
THE ITALIAN CRICKET
My house shelters no specimens of the domestic Cricket, the guest of bakeries and rustic hearths. But although in my village the chinks under the hearthstones are mute, the nights of summer are musical with a singer little known in the North. The sunny hours of spring have their singer, the Field-Cricket of which I have written; while in the summer, during the stillness of the night, we hear the note of the Italian Cricket, the Œcanthus pellucens, Scop. One diurnal and one nocturnal, between them they share the kindly half of the year. When the Field-Cricket ceases to sing it is not long before the other begins its serenade.
The Italian Cricket has not the black costume and heavy shape characteristic of the family. It is, on the contrary, a slender, weakly creature; its colour very pale, indeed almost white, as is natural in view of its nocturnal habits. In handling it one is afraid of crushing it between the fingers. It lives an aerial existence; on shrubs and bushes of all kinds, on tall herbage and grasses, and rarely descends to the earth. Its song, the pleasant voice of the calm, hot evenings from July to October, commences at sunset and continues for the greater part of the night.
This song is familiar to all Provençals; for the least patch of thicket or tuft of grasses has its group of instrumentalists. It resounds even in the granaries, into which the insect strays, attracted thither by the fodder. But no one, so mysterious are the manners of the pallid Cricket, knows exactly what is the source of the serenade, which is often, though quite erroneously, attributed to the common field-cricket, which at this period is silent and as yet quite young.