One Sunday evening, about four months after the cherry party, Barnabas Thayer came out of his house and strolled slowly across the road.

Then he paused, and leaned up against some pasture bars and looked around him.

There was nobody in sight on the road in either direction, and everything was very still, except for the vibrating calls of the hidden insects that come to their flood-tide of life in early autumn.
Barnabas listened to those calls, which had in them a certain element of mystery, as have all things which reach only one sense.

They were in their humble way the voices of the unseen, and as he listened they seemed to take on a rhythmic cadence.

Presently the drone of multifold vibrations sounded in his ears with even rise and fall, like the mighty breathing of Nature herself.