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The night was still and the voices of the contestants sounded clearly into the village, the piping of the smaller being construed into "Colonel Dyer," and the grumble of the bull-frogs into "Elderkin, too." The "frog scare" was a subject of pleasantry directed against Windham for years afterward.

The voices of early evening had settled down to one soothing hum whose deepest note was the steady chumping of the bullocks above their chopped straw, and whose highest was the tinkle of a Bengali dancing-girl's sitar. Most men had eaten and pulled deep at their gurgling, grunting hookahs, which in full blast sound like bull-frogs. At last the lama returned.

Right in the midst of the solemn affair some mischievous fellow gave a squeak and a big jump; and away they all went hurry-skurry, for all the world like a lot of boys turned loose for recess. In a minute they were back again, quiet and sedate, and solemn as bull-frogs.

Human beings, God be praised, are only capable of certain efforts so that one-half the audience were coughing their sides out, while the other were hoarse as bull-frogs from their enthusiasm in less than five minutes.

It is a pastoral land, luxuriantly green; and how beautiful it is as the night falls, and the last of the sunset lingers in the dew-laden air, wreathed with the smoke of many fires; and, as the stars one by one appear in the darkening sky, and the labour of the field ceases, the lowing cattle wend their slow ways toward the villages and the bull-frogs in their thousands raise their evensong.

Fancy the rail gone, and we have neither telegraph, nor school-house, nor anything of all this but the sunset, and even that we could not be there to see in spring-time, at least, unless we could transmigrate for the time into the relinquished forms of some of these aboriginal bull-frogs, which grow to the nice size of two feet in length, destined, no doubt, to receive the souls of habitual croakers hereafter.

The noise and disagreeable odour arising from the bull-frogs and other reptiles that infest the swamp opposite the village at night, filled the air, and rendered it impossible for me to sleep. As I lay restless on my bed, I suddenly heard a gun fired, and, starting up in some alarm, I hastily put on my clothes and descended to the bar of the hotel.

During the heat of the day, the bull-frogs are silent; but as the day declines, and the air becomes cooler, they re-commence their noisy chorus. I suppose these sounds, though not very pleasant to the ears of men, may not be so disagreeable to those of wild animals.

The old gray timbers of the dam are the natural resort of every boy or boatman within their reach; some come in pursuit of pickerel, some of turtles, some of bull-frogs, some of lilies, some of bathing.

I shall never forget my nocturnal visitors, the bull-frogs, who, sans façon, jumped about the room as if dancing a quadrille, not to my amusement but their own, making a most unmusical noise to the tune of something like, “Pay your debts, pay your debts, pay your debts.” After the third croak they paused, probably to give time for everybody to become honest.