These conditions, in whatever way they may affect the human inhabitants, appear to be exceedingly favourable to the house-crickets. It was impossible for anyone to walk in the village of an evening without noticing the noise they made. The cottages on both sides of the street seemed to be alive with them, so that, walking, one was assailed by their shrilling in both ears. Hearing them so much sent me in search of their wild cousin of the fields and of the mole-cricket, but no sound of them could I hear. It was too late for them to sing. No doubt--as White conjectured--the artificial conditions which {169} civilised man has made for the house-cricket have considerably altered its habits. Like the canary and other finches that thrive in captivity, a uniform indoor climate, with food easily found, have made it a singer all the year round. I trust we shall never take to the Japanese custom of caging insects for the sake of their music; but it is probable that a result of keeping tamed or domesticated field-crickets would be to set them singing at all seasons against the cricket on the hearth. A listener would then be able to judge which of the two "sweet and tiny cousins" is the better performer. The house-cricket has to my ears a louder, coarser, a more creaky sound; but we hear him, as a rule, in a room, singing, as it were, confined in a big box; and I remember the case of the skylark, and the disagreeable effect of its shrill and harsh spluttering song when heard from a cage hanging against a wall. The field-cricket, like the soaring skylark, has the wide expanse of open air to soften and etherealise the sound. Gilbert White lived in an age which had its own little, firmly-established, conventional ideas about nature, which he, open-air man though he was, did not escape, or else felt bound to respect. Thus, the prolonged, wild, beautiful call of the peacock, the finest sound made by any domesticated creature, was to the convention of the day "disgustful," and as a disgustful sound he sets it down accordingly; and when he speaks of the keen pleasure it gave him to listen to the field-cricket, he writes in a somewhat apologetic strain: {170} Sounds do not always give us pleasure according to their sweetness and melody, nor do harsh sounds always displease. We are more apt to be captivated or disgusted with the associations which they promote than with the notes themselves. Thus the shrilling of the field-cricket, though sharp and stridulous, yet marvellously delights some hearers, filling their minds with a train of summer ideas of everything that is rural, verdurous, and joyous.