184 SUMMER 



apparent when you listen for them. The hive-bees them- 

 selves have many notes. If you put your ear to the hive 

 you may catch the note of domestic work, low and even and 

 murmurous. The angry note is high and sharp and quick. 

 The morning murmur of the workers busy about the 

 flowers is like neither of these. There are day sounds and 

 night sounds. But in late summer the bulk of the music is 

 of one quality. The season's sounds are not vocal but 

 mechanical, if that may be considered a true contrast ; and 

 to some ears seem almost as if they came from another 

 kingdom, from things that grow with roots in the soil. 

 There are, of course, birds which make mechanical music 

 almost indistinguishably from vocal. The snipe's tail 

 feathers are an ^Eolian harp responsive to the tempest of 

 the bird's descent. No one has yet fully decided how the 

 lesser spotted woodpecker makes his trill, but even these 

 sounds are different in quality from the grating of the grass- 

 hopper's leg, which serves him for fiddle-bow, or the vibrant 

 shriek of the gnat. When August comes a sort of mechanical 

 murmur has quite taken the place of the liquid jollity of the 

 first spring music. You might now almost mistake the 

 drawling greenfinch and the monotonous bunting for tree 

 and hedge insects, if not for the grating of a bough. 



