I had thought to include all or most of the greatest of the insects known in these parts in the last chapter, but the hornet, and the vision it called up of that last revel in the late-blossoming ivy on the eve of winter and cold death, seemed to bring that part of the book to an end. The hornet was the greatest in the sense that a strong man and conqueror is the greatest among ourselves, as the lion or wolf among mammals, and that feathered thunderbolt and scourge, the peregrine falcon, among birds. But there are great and greatest in other senses; and just as there are singers, big and little, as well as warriors among the "insect tribes of human kind," so there are among these smaller men of the mandibulate division of the class Insecta. And their singers, when not too loud and persistent, as they are apt to be in warmer lands than ours, are among the most agreeable of the inhabitants of the earth. They are less to us than to the people of the southern {134} countries of Europe--infinitely less than they were to some of the civilised nations of antiquity, and than they are to the Japanese of to-day. This is, I suppose, on account of their rarity with us, for our best singers are certainly somewhat rare or else exceedingly local. The field-cricket, which must be passed over in this chapter to be described later on, is an instance in point. The universal house-cricket is known to, and in some degree loved by, all or most persons; it is the cricket on the hearth, that warm, bright, social spot when the world outside is dark and cheerless; the lively, companionable sound endears itself to the child, and later in life is dear because of its associations. The field-grasshopper, too, is familiar to everyone in the summer pastures; but the best of our insect musicians, the great green grasshopper, appears to be almost unknown to the people. Here, for instance, where I am writing, there is one on the table which stridulates each afternoon, and in the evening when the lamp is lighted. The sustained bright shrilling penetrates to all parts of the house, and in the tap-room of the inn, two rooms away, the villagers, coming in for their evening beer and conversation, are startled at the unfamiliar, sharp, silvery sound, and ask if it is a bird. [Sidenote: Insect music] Probably it is owing to this rarity of our best insect singers, and partly, too, perhaps to the disagreeable effect on our ears of the loud cicadas heard during our southern travels, that an idea is produced in us of something exotic, or even fantastic, in a taste for insect music. We wonder at the ancient {135} Greeks and the modern Japanese. But it should be borne in mind that the sounds had and have for them an expression they cannot have for us--the expression which comes of association.