SOUNDS. 
137 
no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped 
nature which men have not recognized. They represent 
the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all 
have. All day the sun has shone on the surface of 
some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung 
with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, 
and the chicadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the 
partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now a more 
dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race 
of creatures awakes to express the meaning of Nature 
there. 
Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of 
wagons over bridges, —a sound heard farther than almost 
any other at night, — the baying of dogs, and sometimes 
again the lowing of some disconsolate cow in a distant 
barn-yard. In the mean while all the shore rang with 
the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine- 
bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing 
a catch in their Stygian lake,— if the Walden nymphs 
will pardon the comparison, for though there are almost 
no weeds, there are frogs there, — who would fain keep 
up the hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though 
their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, 
mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor, and 
become only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet 
intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the 
past, but mere saturation and waterloggedness and dis¬ 
tention. The most aldermanic, with his chin upon a 
heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling 
chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught 
of the once scorned w T ater, and passes round the cup 
with the ejaculation tr-r-r-oonk , tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r- 
oonk! and straightway comes over the water from some 
