to
leap; his poor life cut short upon that mountain by some unknown
accident. But the Kangaroo rat, it proved, was no such unknown animal;
and my discovery was nothing.

Crickets were not wanting. I thought I could make out exactly four of
them, each with a corner of his own, who used to make night musical at
Silverado. In the matter of voice, they far excelled the birds, and
their ringing whistle sounded from rock to rock, calling and replying
the same thing, as in a meaningless opera. Thus, children in full health
and spirits shout together, to the dismay of neighbours; and their idle,
happy, deafening vociferations rise and fall, like the song of the
crickets. I used to sit at night on the platform, and wonder why these
creatures were so happy; and what was wrong with man that he also did
not wind up his days with an hour or two of shouting; but I suspect that
all long-lived animals are solemn. The dogs alone are hardly used by
nature; and it seems a manifest injustice for poor Chuchu to die in his
teens, after a life so shadowed and troubled, continually shaken with
alarm, and the tear of elegant sentiment permanently in his eye.

There was another neighbour of ours at Silverado, small but very active,
a destructive fellow. This was a black, ugly fly--a bore, the Hansons
called him--who lived by hundreds in the boarding of our house. He
entered by a round hole, more neatly pierced than a man could do it with
a gimlet, and he seems to have spent his life in cutting out the
interior of the plank, but whether as a dwelling or a store-house, I
could never find. When I used to lie in bed in the morning for a
rest--we had no easy-chairs in Silverado--I would hear, hour after hour,
the sharp cutting sound of his labours, and from time to time a dainty
shower of sawdust would fall upon the blankets. There lives no more
industrious creature than a bore.

And now that I have named to the reader all our animals and insects
without exception--only I find I have forgotten the flies--he will be
able to appreciate the singular privacy and silence of our days. It was
not only man who was excluded: animals, the song of birds, the lowing of
cattle, the bleating of sheep, clouds even, and the variations of the
weather, were here also wanting; and as, day after day, the sky was one
dome of blue, and the pines below us stood motionless in the still air,
so the hours themselves were marked out from each other only by the
series of our