LOCUSTA VIRIDISSIMA 149 



again. Had I not been expecting to hear an insect 

 singing high up in the trees, I should have said at 

 once that this was a grasshopper's music, though 

 unlike that of any of the species I am accustomed 

 to hear. It was a sustained sound, like that of the 

 great green grasshopper, but not of that excessively 

 bright, subtle, penetrative quality : it was a lower 

 sound, not shrill, and distinctly slower in other words, 

 the beats or drops of sound which compose the 

 grasshopper's song, and run in a stream, were more 

 distinct and separate, giving it a trilling rather than 

 a reeling character. Had we, in England, possessed 

 a stridulating mantis, which is capable of a slower, 

 softer sound than any grasshopper, I should have 

 concluded that I was listening to one ; but there was 

 not, in this New Forest music, the slightest resem- 

 blance to the cicada sounds I had heard in former 

 years. The cicadas may be a "merry people," and 

 they certainly had the prettiest things said of them 

 by the poets of Greece, but I do not like their brain- 

 piercing, everlasting whirr ; this sound of the English 

 cicada, assuming that I heard that insect, was distinctly 

 pleasing. 



But more than cicada, or field-cricket, or any other 

 insect musician in the land, is our great green grass- 

 hopper, or leaf-cricket, Locusta viridissima. I have 

 been accustomed to hear him in July and August, 

 in hedges, gardens, and potato patches at different 

 points along the south coast and at some inland 



