Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/55

Rh noise in the house, as good as a watch-dog. The crowing of cocks too reminds me of it, and now I think of it, it had precisely the intonation and accent of the cat-owl's hoó hoo-hoo-o-o, in each case, a sonorous dwelling on the last syllable.

They get the pitch and break ground with the first note, and then prolong and swell it in the last.

The commonest and cheapest sounds, as the barking of a dog, produce the same effect on fresh and healthy ears that the rarest music does. It depends on your appetite for sound. Just as a crust is sweeter to a healthy appetite than confectionery to a pampered or diseased one. It is better that these cheap sounds be music to us than that we have the rarest ears for music in any other sense. I have lain awake at night many a time to think of the barking of a dog which I had heard long before, bathing my being again in those waves of sound, as a frequenter of the opera might lie awake remembering the music he had heard.

As my mother made my pockets once of father's old fire bags, with the date of the formation of the society on them, 1794 (though they made but rotten pockets), so we put our meaning into those old mythologies. I am sure that the Greeks were commonly innocent of any such double entendre as we attribute to them.