Cricket

an insect closely related to the grasshopper and locust. The old English name is grig, whence the proverbial expression, "as merry as a grig." The back is flat. The wing covers bend squarely down over the sides of the abdomen. The antennae are long. "Black, glossy crickets," says Holmes, "with their long filaments sticking out like whips of four-horse stage coaches." The characteristic noise or chirp is made by the male by raising his wing covers and rasping one on the other. An examination of a male cricket shows that ridges and rasping edges, used like a fiddle and bow, are admirably and ingeniously adapted to produce chirps at the player's pleasure. Crickets, like grasshoppers, lay their eggs in pockets in the earth to hatch the following spring. In grain-producing regions crickets sometimes infest grain shocks and do not a little damage, especially by way of cutting bands. They get into clothing also, and cut holes. If a coat be left on the stubble over night, it is likely to be riddled. Crickets have an active, cheerful way that has made them a place in literature and in the regard of households, well expressed in Dickens' Cricket on the Hearth. The following is a more juvenile view:

In olden times the Florentines kept crickets in cages for good luck. The custom still prevails, it is said, in some parts of Japan. See Cicada; Grasshopper; Locust; Katydid