At the end of September, when the nights are still warm, they begin the process of beating, by the pale moonlight.  During the day, the hemp has been heated in the oven; it is taken out at night to be beaten hot.  For that purpose, they use a sort of wooden horse, surmounted by a wooden lever, which, falling upon the grooves, breaks the plant without cutting it.  Then it is that you hear at night, in the country, the sharp, clean-cut sound of three blows struck in rapid succession.  Then there is silence for a moment; that means that the arm is moving the handful of hemp, in order to break it in another place.  And the three blows are repeated; it is the other arm acting on the lever, and so it goes on until the moon is dimmed by the first rays of dawn.  As this work is done only a few days in the year, the dogs do not become accustomed to it, and howl plaintively at every point of the compass.

It is the time for unusual and mysterious noises in the country.  The migrating cranes fly southward at such a height that the eye can hardly distinguish them in broad daylight.  At night, you can only hear them; and their hoarse, complaining voices, lost among the clouds, seem like the salutation and the farewell of souls in torment, striving to find the road to heaven and compelled by an irresistible fatality to hover about the abodes of men, not far from earth; for these migratory birds exhibit strange uncertainty and mysterious anxiety in their aerial wanderings.  It sometimes happens that they lose the wind, when fitful breezes struggle for the mastery or succeed one another in the upper regions.  Thereupon, when one of those reverses happens during the day, we see the leader of the line soar at random through the air, then turn sharply about, fly back, and take his place at the rear of the triangular phalanx, while a skilful manoeuvre on the part of his companions soon brings them into line behind him.  Often, after vain efforts, the exhausted leader abandons the command of the caravan; another comes forward, takes his turn at the task, and gives place to a third, who finds the current and leads the host forward in triumph.  But what shrieks, what reproaches, what remonstrances, what fierce maledictions or anxious questions are exchanged by those winged pilgrims in an unfamiliar tongue!

In the resonant darkness you hear the dismal uproar circling above the houses sometimes for a long while; and as you can see nothing, you feel, in spite of yourself, a sort of dread and a sympathetic uneasiness until the sobbing flock has passed out of hearing in space.