excited than the others, keeping his wings violently agitated almost without a pause, and yet not the faintest sound proceeded from him. It proved on examination that one of his stiff overwings had been bitten or torn off at the base, so that he had but half of his sounding apparatus left, and no music could his most passionate efforts ever draw from it, and, silent, he was no more in the world of green grasshoppers than a bird with a broken wing in the world of birds. [Sidenote: Singing-contests] For it cannot be doubted that his own music is the greatest, the one all-absorbing motive and passion of his little soul. This may seem to be saying too much--to attribute something of human feelings to a creature so immeasurably far removed from us. Fantastic in shape, even among beings invertebrate and unhuman, one that indeed sees with opal eyes set in his green goat-like mask, but who hears with his forelegs, breathes through spiracles set in his sides, whipping the air for other sense-impressions and unimaginable sorts of knowledge with his excessively {146} long limber horns, or antennæ, just as a dry-fly fisher whips the crystal stream for speckled trout; and, finally, who wears his musical apparatus (his vocal organs) like an electric shield or plaster on the small of his back. Nevertheless it is impossible to watch their actions without regarding them as creatures of like passions with ourselves. The resemblance is most striking when we think not of what we, hard Saxons, are in this cold north, but of the more fiery, music-loving races in warmer countries. I remember in my early years, before the advent of "Progress" in those outlying realms, that the ancient singing contests still flourished among the gauchos of La Plata. They were all lovers of their own peculiar kind of music, singing endless _decimas_ and _coplas_ in high-pitched nasal tones to the strum-strumming of a guitar; and when any singer of a livelier mind than his fellows had the faculty of improvising, his fame went forth, and the others of his quality were filled with emulation, and journeyed long distances over the lonely plains to meet and sing against him. How curiously is this like our island grasshoppers, who have come to us unchanged from the past, and are neither Saxons nor Celts, but true, original, ancient Britons--the little grass-green people with passionate souls! You can almost hear him say--this little green minstrel you have been watching when his shrill note has brought back as shrill an answer--as he resolutely sets out over the tall, bending grasses in the direction of the sound, "I'll teach him to sing!" {147} [Sidenote: A human parallel]