184 HAMPSHIRE DAYS 



as White conjectured the artificial conditions which 

 civilised man has made for the house cricket have 

 considerably altered its habits. Like the canary and 

 other finches that thrive in captivity, a uniform in- 

 door climate, with food easily found, have made it 

 a singer all the year round. I trust we shall never 

 take to the Japanese custom of caging insects for 

 the sake of their music; but it is probable that a 

 result of keeping tamed or domesticated field crickets 

 would be to set them singing at all seasons against 

 the cricket on the hearth. A listener would then 

 be able to judge which of the two "sweet and tiny 

 cousins " is the better performer. The house cricket 

 has to my ears a louder, coarser, a more creaky sound ; 

 but we hear him, as a rule, in a room, singing, as it 

 were, confined in a big box ; and I remember the 

 case of the skylark, and the disagreeable effect of its 

 shrill and harsh spluttering song when heard from 

 a cage hanging against a wall. The field cricket, 

 like the soaring skylark, has the wide expanse of 

 open air to soften and etherealise the sound. 



Gilbert White lived in an age which had its own 

 little, firmly - established, conventional ideas about 

 nature, which he, open-air man though he was, did 

 not escape, or else felt bound to respect. Thus, the 

 prolonged, wild, beautiful call of the peacock, the 

 finest sound made by any domesticated creature, was 

 to the convention of the day "disgustful," and as a 

 disgustful sound he sets it down accordingly ; and when 



