Page:Florida Trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive.djvu/373

 neither body nor location. It is as impossible to guess the direction whence the noises come as it is to find the creatures themselves. They are but a million infinitesimal shrillnesses merging in an uproar that nevertheless soothes and lulls. From the gray void where by day there was a river come other voices, they tell me those of frogs. These swell in rattling gusts up out of silence and down back again, an unmusical clangor as of drowning cowbells struck harshly. These should be mechanical frogs with brazen throats and tense cat-gut tongues, made in Switzerland, frankensteins of the batrachian world, wound up and warranted for eight hours, to make such eerie, disquieting music. To turn your back to the river and walk inland along the dim, uncertain aisles of the orange groves is to escape this and meet pleasanter if still mysterious voices.

From dusk till the full blackness of the moonless night wipes out all things below the tree tops the Southern whip-poor-will sings. The voice is less shrill and insistent than that of our Northern whip-poor-will, does not carry quite so far, is less of a plaint and more of a chuckle. Some Southern people say that the bird says, "Dick-fell-out-of-the-white-oak," others "Dick-married-the-widow." Both phrases seem to recognize a humorous quality in the tale the bird has to tell, far different from the lonely "whip-poor-will."