INSECT SUCKERS AND BITERS. 215 
when they are hatched, if they escape being devoured 
by underground creatures. Then as each mother has 
perhaps laid between two or three hundred eggs, it 
is not surprising that the ground and bushes are 
covered with tiny grasshoppers leaping and feeding, 
but without wings. At this time they will all be 
silent, and as they go on growing will cast skin 
after skin, till, when the sixth skin is being thrown 
off (g t Fig. 72), their wings appear; and then the 
young male grasshoppers begin to rub their front 
leathery wings sharply against each other, so that 
from their base, where they have a talc -like plate 
with strong ridges upon it, that shrill cry arises by 
which they call to their friends. 
The crickets, on the other hand, will not be seen 
in the daytime, for they hide in holes in the ground 
till night falls, and then come out for food and 
enjoyment. The only way to entice one out by day 
is to tickle the hole with a straw, when they will 
seize it, and so can be pulled out. 
In the same way the house cricket hides in its 
hole behind the oven, where it first came from the 
egg, and only ventures out to leap and fly about the 
kitchen at night, when it steals the bread-crumbs and 
flour, and sips the milk and beer. Often it will begin 
its chirp long before it comes out, and 
" On a lone winter's evening, when the frost 
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there thrills 
The cricket's song," . . . 
for the warmth keeps him awake and alive. But if 
you leave the room through the winter without fire, 
then he will sleep in the cracks of the chimney till 
the warm weather comes back. 
