PIPERS AND MINNESINGERS 21 



praise, yet our field-crickets liave a lilting for warm 

 comers, and will, if encouraged, take up their abode 

 among our hearthstones. The greatest tribute to the 

 music of the cricket is the wide range of human 

 emotion which it expresses. " As merry as a cricket " 

 is a very old saying and is evidence that the cricket's 

 fiddling has ever chimed with the gay moods of dancers 

 and merrymakers. Again, the cricket's song is made 

 an emblem of peace ; and again we hear that the 

 cricket's "plaintive cry" is taken as the harbinger of 

 the sere and dying year. From happiness to utter 

 loneliness is the gamut covered by this sympathetic 

 song. Leigh Hunt found him glad and thus addresses 

 him : — 



" And you, warm little housekeeper who class 



With those who think the candles come too soon, 

 Loving the fire, and with your trieksome tune 

 Nick the glad, silent moments as they pass." 



The chirp of the cricket is, in literature, usually 

 associated with the coming of autumn ; but the careful 

 listener may hear him in the early summer, although 

 his song is not so insistent as later in the season. To 

 me it is the most enticing of all the insect strains; there 

 seems to be in it an invitation to " come and be cosy 

 and happy while the summer and the sunshine last." I 

 have also always been an admirer of the manly and self- 



