sound-waves flowing in easy contours, which others have not the leisure
to distinguish. Often have I found myself as I strolled gloating over the
exquisite absence of sound--enjoying in full mental relish the quaint and
refined sensation. Yet when I have stopped and listened determinedly,
viciously analysing my sensations, have I become aware of a hubbub of
frail and interblended sounds. That which I had thought to be distilled
silence, was microphonic Babel--an intimate commingling of analogous
noises varying in quality and intensity. By wilful resistance to what
Falstaff called "the disease of not listening," I have been privileged to
become aware of the singing of a quiet tune, some of the phrases of which
were directly derivative from inarticulate vegetation--the thud of glossy
blue quandongs on the soft floor of the jungle, the clicking of a
discarded leaf as it fell from topmost twigs down through the strata of
foliage, the bursting of a seed-pod, the patter of rejects from the
million pink-fruited fig, overhanging the beach, the whisper of leaves,
the faint squeal where interlocked branches fret each other unceasingly,
the sigh of phantom zephyrs too elusive to be felt.

Echoes from vistas of silence far in the jungle lost their individuality
in a sob. Grasshoppers clinked in the forest, the hum of bees and
beetles, the fluty plaint of a painted pigeon far in the gloom, the
furtive scamper of scrub fowl among leaves made tender by decay, the
splash of startled fish in the shadows, commingled and blended to the
accompaniment of that subdued aerial buzz by which Nature manifests the
more secret of her functions and art--that ineffable minstrelsy to which
her silent battalions keep step. Preoccupation, the whirl of my own
temperate thoughts, scared silence, while as soon as the mental machine
was stilled, the very trees became vocal. Thus have I caught fleet
silences as they passed in chase of fugitive sounds.