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I passed their orchestra going home the other evening, with a small lad, and they were at it, all parts, ten thousand peeps, shrill, ear-piercing, and incessant, coming up from every quarter, accompanied by a second, from some larger swimmer with his trombone, and broken in upon, every now and then, but not discordantly, with the loud, quick hallo, that resembles the cry of the tree-toad.
His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines. It was all black, no gray; so was his long, mixed-up whiskers. There warn't no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white; not like another man's white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body's flesh crawl a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white.
His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines. It was all black, no gray; so was his long, mixed-up whiskers. There warn't no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white; not like another man's white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body's flesh crawl a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white.
"Good for Hugh!" cried Phil. "Just the same with me, Hugh. It makes me feel all fuzzy inside my head, like the tree-toad." "You ARE like a tree-toad!" said Gerald. "That is the resemblance that has haunted me, and I could not make it out, because as a rule tree-toads are not fuzzy. I thank thee, Jew I mean Hugh for teaching me that word. My brother, the tree-toad! Every one will know whom I mean."
Not in the deep woods, but among the scattered dilapidated oaks and groves, on the hills and in the fields, I hear almost every day his uncanny note, ktr-r-r, ktr-r-r, like that of some larger tree-toad, proceeding from an oak grove just beyond the boundary. He is a strong-scented fellow, and very tough.
The horses can cheerfully do their mile in fifteen or twenty minutes, but they make more row about it than a high-pressure Mississippi steamer; and the crazy little trap is noisier in proportion to its size than anything I have ever seen, except perhaps an Indiana tree-toad. If you make an excursion outside the walls, the omnibus, noise and all, is inevitable; let it come.
It fills one with sentiment and a tender longing, this voice of the tree-toad. Man is a strange being. Deaf to the prayers of friends, to the sermons and warnings of the church, to the calls of duty, to the pleadings of his better nature, he is touched by the tree-toad. The signs of the spring multiply.
I could hear the water rushing through the valley and sometimes sounds like trees breaking. And I heard a tree-toad moaning it seemed funny to hear that. "Bert!" I called. I felt cold, and my wrists were all tingling. "Bert!" Then I stuck the paddle in the mud and hung my hat on the end of it. Just then I heard a voice.
The frogs in the creek were tuning their bass-viols. A tree-toad rattled on some unseen trunk, and the whole woods heaved its great lungs in the steady breathing which it never leaves off, but which becomes a roar and a wheeze in stormy or winter weather. "There isn't anything" began Grandma Padgett, but between thing and "here" came the distinct laugh of a child.
From a single window a faint light gleamed; then it vanished, only to reappear a few moments later at another window. Among the masses of foliage fireflies glistened; a tree-toad began to make a sound but almost immediately stopped. The front door had apparently opened and some person or persons came out. The faint crunchings on the gravel indicated more than one person.
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