Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/179

 seemed, like the bull in the funeral of Cock Robin, to toll the knell of the departed summer on the evening of the first rainy day. If the winter thus announced had been one of ice and snow, there would have been something most lugubrious in the bull-frog's way of heralding it, but sounds depend much for their effect upon the circumstances with which we mentally associate them. The chirping of the grasshopper, for instance, was disliked by Rosa, "because it reminded her of summer," although the very recollection of summer, with which the sound of the chirp is associated, has probably been one of the chief reasons that has made the lively little singer so popular with poetical writers. Summer, however, as she appears in English hedgerows and in the Australian bush, wears two distinct aspects, and to a servant's mind the idea of that season in Swan River is connected with little else than the remembrance of intense heat, that converts each ordinary household task, in scholastic language, into "an imposition."

In the course of a few weeks the frog seemed to cheer up a little, or to give place to a musician in better spirits; for his one continuous mournful note, sounding each time as if shot out of his lungs on a sudden, was changed to three lively ones, so unlike any which we had ever heard from frogs before that we could not for several nights determine by what agency they were really produced. These notes had such a metallic sound that at first I thought the noise came from a blacksmith's shop, whilst my husband was equally certain that it was a distant cracked piano; eventually I renounced the notion of the anvil in favour of a jew's-harp, and to this