With flowers and leaves, the bird songs have faded out, and the hum and
chirp of insect life, the low and bleat of herds and flocks afield, and
the busy sounds of husbandry have grown infrequent. There are lapses of
such silence that the ear aches for some audible signal of life; and
then to appease it there comes with the rising breeze the solemn murmur
of the pines like the song of the sea on distant shores, the sibilant
whisper of the dead herbage, the clatter of dry pods, and the fitful
stir of fallen leaves, like a scurry of ghostly feet fleeing in affright
at the sound of their own passage.
The breeze puffs itself into a fury of wind, and the writhing branches
shriek and moan and clash as if the lances of phantom armies were
crossed in wild melee.
The woods are full of unlipped voices speaking one with another in
pleading, in anger, in soft tones of endearment; and one hears his name
called so distinctly that he answers and calls again, but no answer is
vouchsafed him, only moans and shrieks and mocking laughter, till one
has enough of wild voices and longs for a relapse of silence.
More softly it is broken when through the still air comes the cheery
note of the chickadee and the little trumpet of his comrade the nuthatch
and far away the muffled beat of the grouse's drum, or from a distance
the mellow baying of a hound and its answering echoes, swelling and
dying on hilltop or glen, or mingling in melodious confusion.
From skyward comes the clangor of clarions, wild and musical,
proclaiming the march of gray cohorts of geese advancing southward
through the hills and dales of cloudland. There come, too, the quick
whistling beat of wild ducks' pinions, the cry of a belated plover, and
the creaking voice of a snipe. Then the bawling of a ploughman in a
far-off field--and farther away the rumble and shriek of a railroad
train--brings the listening ear to earth again and its plodding busy
life.