| Show MUSICAL grasshoppers I 1 was once engaged in the arduous and monotonous task of driving a large number of sheep a distance of miles in excessively hot weather when sheep prefer standing still to traveling five or six gauchos gauchas were with me and we were on the southern pampas of buenos ayrene near to a long precipitous stony sierra which rose to a height of five or six hu hundred adred feet above the plain who that has traveled for eighteen days on a deal level in a broiling sun can resist a hill that sierra was more sublime to us than conon digua than Illi II limani maril leaving the sheep I 1 rode to it with three of the men and after securing our horses on the lower slope we began our laborious ascent now the gaucho when taken from his horse on which he lives like a kind of parasite is a very slow moving creature and I 1 soon left my friends far behind coming to a place where ferns and flowing herbage grew thick I 1 began to hear all about me sounds of a character utterly unlike any natural sounds I 1 was acquainted with innumerable numerable lia low clear voices tiu tinkling kling or pealing like minute sweet toned resonant bells for the sounds were purely metallic and perfectly bell like I 1 was completely ringed round with the mysterious music and as I 1 walked it rose and sank rhythmically keeping time to my steps I 1 stood still and immediately the sounds ceased I 1 took a step forward and again the ferry bells were set ringing as if at each step my foot touched a central meeting point of a thousand radiating threads each thread attached to a peal of little beus bells hanging concealed among the herbage I 1 waited for my companions and called their attention to the phenomenon and to them also it was a thing strange and perplexing it is the bell snake cried one excitedly this is the rattlesnake but although at that time I 1 had no experience ot of this reptile I 1 knew that he was wrong yet how natural the mi mistake the spanish name of bell snake had bad made him imagine that the whirr whirring 9 sound of the vibrating rattles resembling re sem bling muffled cicada music is really bell like in character eventually we discovered that the sound was made by grasshoppers but they were seen only to be lost for I 1 could not capture one so excessively shy and cunning had a perpetual ringing on their own little tocsins made them longmans longman 18 magazine |
