Now I choose the shade of a live oak tree, veils of Spanish moss, a hundred cicadas singing in the branches.

In the patio of the comfortable little hotel we heard the cicadas; but I did not hear the extraordinary screaming whistle of the locomotive cicada, which I had heard in the gardens of the house in which I stayed at Asuncion.

A bird seizes a noisy cicada from a sunny leaf, and as it flies away the captive draws out one long scream of despair.