For half an hour after sunset he keeps up this fast speed.  Apparently he is getting supper after his long sleep through the day.  At the end of half an hour he begins to work more leisurely.  The pieces fall on the roof every now and then.  Possibly he is taking the sweetmeats to his hole, high up in a tree.  Through the night there is the intermittent sound of his labor.  Sometimes, towards morning, he drops in for a visit,—­literally drops in, by way of the chimney and the open fireplace.  He knows no fear.  Going to the kitchen, he helps himself to the doughnut left on the table for him.  If it is a whole one, he nibbles all around it.  If only half a one he carries it away.  You may close the kitchen door and catch him with your bare hands.  He will neither squeal nor bite.  But he makes a poor pet, because he sleeps in the daytime and works in the darkness.  He strongly dislikes the light.  If put into a box he backs up into the darkest corner, brings his beautiful flat tail between his four legs and up over his nose and his eyes.  Rolled up lengthwise in this ball he spends the day; but when evening comes he is active enough.  If kept for any length of time he makes a very docile pet and will beg permission to sleep in your pocket.  But it is better to give him his freedom, and see him scamper up one tree and “fly” to another.  As he springs he spreads out the whitish membranes along each side, holds his flat tail rigid, quivering.  Thus he goes down, parachute fashion, on an inclined plane.  Just before he gets to the tree trunk which is his objective point, he makes momentum aid his muscles in the accomplishment of an upward curve.

* * * * *

Crickets and katydids droned and fiddled all night, and when the katydids quit at daybreak, other grasshoppers and cicadas were ready to take their places in the screechy orchestra.  Night and day they shrill their ceaseless music.  It is all masculine love music, as much an expression of their tender feelings towards listening maidens, as the old troubadour songs to fair ladies or as the exquisite song of the rose-breasted grosbeak is to his brown-garbed spouse in May and June.  Late in July it began with the short rasps and screeches of tiny hoppers flitting in the grass; the katydid began to tune up on the evening of July 29.  Then the long-legged conductor waved his baton and the orchestra was off.  It started moderato, but quickly increased to an allegro, and sometimes it is almost presto.  For the first two weeks in August new fiddlers were constantly being added, and now there are enough to fill every band stand all through the woods.  The noise at night is almost ear-splitting.  The old preacher was right about it.  There are times when the grasshopper is a burden.  At the hour of sunset the cicada winds his rattle most joyously, subsiding into silence as darkness comes and making way for the katydid.