of the evening crickets used to make itself most
distinctly heard,--so that I well remember I used to think that the
purring of these little creatures, which mingled with the batrachian hymns
from the neighboring swamp, was peculiar to Saturday evenings. I don't
know that anything could give a clearer idea of the quieting and subduing
effect of the old habit of observance of what was considered holy time,
than this strange, childish fancy.

Yes, and there was still another sound which mingled its solemn cadences
with the waking and sleeping dreams of my boyhood. It was heard only at
times,--a deep, muffled roar, which rose and fell, not loud, but vast,--a
whistling boy would have drowned it for his next neighbor, but it must
have been heard over the space of a hundred square miles. I used to wonder
what this might be. Could it be the roar of the thousand wheels and the
ten thousand footsteps jarring and tramping along the stones of the
neighboring city? That would be continuous; but this, as I have said, rose
and fell in regular rhythm. I remember being told, and I suppose this to
have been the true solution, that it was the sound of the waves, after a
high wind, breaking on the long beaches many miles distant. I should
really like to know whether any observing people living ten miles, more or
less, inland from long beaches,--in such a town, for instance, as
Cantabridge, in the eastern part of the Territory of the Massachusetts,--
have ever observed any such sound, and whether it was rightly accounted
for as above.

Mingling with these inarticulate sounds in the low murmur of memory, are
the echoes of certain voices I have heard at rare intervals. I grieve to
say it, but our people, I think, have not generally agreeable voices. The
marrowy organisms, with skins that shed water like the backs of ducks,
with smooth surfaces neatly padded beneath, and velvet linings to their
singing-pipes, are not so common among us as that other pattern of
humanity with angular outlines and plane surfaces, arid integuments, hair
like the fibrous covering of a cocoa-nut in gloss and suppleness as well
as color, and voices at once thin and strenuous,--acidulous enough to
produce effervescence with alkalis, and stridulous enough to sing duets
with the katydids. I think our conversational soprano, as sometimes
overheard in the cars, arising from a group of young persons, who may have
taken the train at one of our great industrial centres, for