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I liked to wait until the last ripple had lapped against the sand beneath, and then slip quietly in from the margin of the jungle and perch like a great tree-frog on some convenient shelf. Seumas and Brigid would have enjoyed it, in spite of the fact that the Leprechauns seemed to have just gone.
When the blue-winged cricket, basking on the pebbles of some country footpath, grows deliciously intoxicated with the heat of the sun and rubs its great posterior thighs against the roughened edge of its wing-covers; when the green tree-frog swells its throat in the foliage of the bushes, distending it to form a resonant cavity when the rain is imminent, is it calling to its absent mate?
"You could not convince him of that," I said, disengaging myself from her grasp, "if you were to try, for I have honest eyes in my head, not speckled like a toad's back, nor turning white with rage like a tree-frog laid on a window-sill; but, if you ever dare to lay your hand on me again, Evelyn Erle, I will tell papa every thing there, now! This is the last time, remember."
You must know that the true frog is a weather-prophet: when it is going to rain he knows it, comes out of the water and croaks his prophecy; when dry weather is coming he goes back to the water." "Ah!" began Noémi, getting interested. "I will catch one," said Timar; "I hear one among the bushes." He soon came back with a tree-frog between his palms. Noémi trembled and got excited.
Soon the green alone was dominant; and when I had finished thinking of pleasant, far-off green things, the wonderful emerald of my great tree-frog of last year came to mind, Gawain the mysterious, and I wondered if I should ever solve his life. In front of me was a little jungle rainpool. At the base of the miniature precipice of the gorge, this pool was a thing of clay.
I had the passion of collecting animals, I felt toward them so great a love that I wept if I thought them unhappy. And I still endure a deep anguish when I remember the little nightingales which some one gave me and which pined away in the dining-room. Still at the same age, in order to make me go to sleep, they had to place not far from me a bottle containing a tree-frog.
The Occidental called me a fifth-rate Kerbstone broker with water on the brain; another said I was a tree-frog that had got into the same meadow with Longhurst, and had blown myself out till I went pop. It was rough on a man in his honeymoon; so was what they said about my looks, and what I had on, and the way I perspired. But I braced myself up with the Flying Scud.
In a reasonable scheme of earthly things he filled the niche of a giant green tree-frog, and one of us seemed to remember that the Knight Gawain was enamored of green, and so we dubbed him.
Not a crow, nor a jay, nor a chickadee had heart enough to cheep. But little Hyla, the tree-frog, was nothing daunted. Since the last week in February, throughout the spring and the noisy summer on till this dreary time, he had been cheerfully, continuously piping. This was his last call. Peep, peep, peep! he piped in February; Peep, peep, peep! in August; Peep, peep, peep! in December.
It is the partridge drumming upon his log Hark! still again, to that quavering note, resembling somewhat the voice of the tree-frog when the storm is gathering, but not so clear and shrill. It is the call of the raccoon, as he clambers up some old forest tree, and seats himself among the lowest of its great limbs.
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