CURIOSITY OF BIRDS AND BEASTS 589 



Once in a while a bird will wake up and sing; more 

 frequently, however, the noise they make is evidently of 

 the same nature as that of a dog which yelps in its 

 dreams, or the man who mumbles in his slumbers. But 

 the little interruptions made by restless birds only make 

 silence more palpable. 



At the close of one blustering November day I was 

 sitting on the rough stone veranda to my log house, 

 when a voice behind the building shouted " Hoo-hoo, 

 hoo-hoo ! Who-ah ! " and I smikd to myself at what I 

 thought to be someone's crude attempt to imitate an 

 owl. I thought that it was too loud, too much of a 

 yell, and altogether a very poor imitation. Imagine 

 my dismay when, on investigation, I discovered nobody 

 back of the house, but on a limb of a white oak there 

 sat two big owls laughing in a loud, fiendish manner 

 at my discomfiture. 



Last summer, while on an expedition exploring a new 

 district west of Lake St. John, I heard the owls hoot- 

 ing at noontime near our camp. But hoot-owls only 

 occasionally visit my camp in Pennsylvania, and I have 

 had city visitors come to Wild Lands who declared that 

 the silence at night was so intense that it hurt their ear 

 drums with its pressure. 



Along about the Fourth of July, when the chestnut 

 trees are in bloom, the lightning bugs make their ap- 

 pearance and sprinkle the dark woods with sparks of 

 fire. The grasshoppers are maturing and all the in- 

 sects become more numerous. In August the cicada, or, 

 as it is commonly known, the locust, begins to sing in 

 the trees with a dry, vibrating noise, so much resembling 



