Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/140

ing of the Sudbury road, the swallows are diving at a tortoise-shell cat who cavorts rather awkwardly as if she did not know whether to be scared or not. And now, the sun having buried himself in the low cloud in the west and hung out his crimson curtain, I hear, while sitting by the wall, the sound of the stake-driver at a distance, like that made by a man pumping in a neighboring farm-yard, watering his cattle, or like chopping wood before his door on a frosty morning, and I can imagine it like driving a stake in a meadow. The pumper. I immediately went in search of the bird, but after going one third of a mile, it did not sound much nearer, and the two parts of the sound did not appear to proceed from the same place. What is the peculiarity of these sounds which penetrate so far on the key-note of Nature? At last I got near to the brook in the meadow behind Hubbard's wood, but I could not tell if it were farther or nearer than that. When I got within half a dozen rods of the brook, it ceased, and I heard it no more. I suppose that I scared it. As before I was farther off than I thought, so now I was nearer than I thought. It is not easy to understand how so small a creature can make so loud a sound by merely sucking or throwing out water with pump-like lungs. It was a sound as of gulping water.