Home
The narrator describes his home, the place where he used to live when he was a child. He depicts it as a “little bit mixed sort of block, fairly solidly lower middle class”. Due to the fact that their neighbors are “mostly small businessmen”, they have corresponding “middle-sized gracefully fretted wood houses built in the late nineties and early nineteen hundreds, with small front and side and more spacious back yards, and trees in the yards, and porches”. This imagery gives an impression of a quiet suburb, which is a perfect place for a peaceful life.
Evening meals
Evening is a special time of a day, because it is when the whole family gathers together. The Follets and their neighbors usually have supper at six. It is said that there “was still daylight, shining softly and with a tarnish, like the lining of a shell, and the carbon lamps lifted at the corners were on in the light, and the locusts were started, and the fire flies were out, and a few frogs' were flopping in the dewy grass, by the time the fathers and the children came out”. This image gives an impression of the bliss and peacefulness of a spring or a summer night.
Sounds of a night
Rufus associates night with the sound of locusts, which is “dry, and it seems not to be rasped or vibrated but urged from him as if through a small orifice by a breath that can never give out”. There is an impression that “there is never one locust but an illusion of at least a thousand”. It is said that “the noise of each locust is pitched in some classic locust range out of which none of them varies more than two full tones: and yet you seem to hear each locust discrete from all the rest, and there is a long, slow, pulse in their noise, like the scarcely defined arch of a long and high set bridge.” This image gives an impression of a quiet summer night, when only locusts disturb the stillness.
