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Updated: May 12, 2025
Riding along the road one day on the heels of a violent summer tempest, I saw the ground swarming with minute hopping creatures. I got out and captured my hands full. They proved to be tree-toads, many of them no larger than crickets, and none of them larger than a bumblebee. There seemed to be thousands of them. The mark of the tree-toad was the round, flattened ends of their toes.
It is clear that the factors that direct the development of a wood frog's egg so that it becomes a wood-frog and not a tree-toad must lie in the egg itself, as derivatives from the two parent organisms. Weismann and his followers have proved that a peculiar substance in the nuclei of the egg and its daughter-products contains the essential factors of development, whatever these may be.
The cry of the small animal at last conveys to my sister's mind a notion of distress, and rising she peers closely along the path. Starting back with a cry of alarm, she calls and my mother hurries out. She, too, examines the ground, and at last points out to me a long striped snake with a poor, shrieking little tree-toad in its mouth. The horror of this scene fixes it in my mind.
The tree-toad calls before and during a shower, mainly, I think, because he likes to have his back wet, but why a well-dressed bird like the cuckoo should become a prophet of the rain is a mystery, unless the rain and the shadows are congenial to the gloomy mood in which he usually seems to be.
The home of the tree-toad, I am convinced, is usually a hollow limb or other cavity in the tree; here he makes his headquarters, and passes most of the day. For two years a pair of them frequented an old apple-tree near my house, occasionally sitting at the mouth of a cavity that led into a large branch, but usually their voices were heard from within the cavity itself.
"I do not believe that a tree-toad can change color more easily," he observed to the old cniht who rode at his side. "That Englishmen are not stout fighters, no man can say, but the love of it is not in their breasts; while with Northmen " "With Northmen," Morcard added, "to fight is to eat." Another faint smile touched Sebert's mouth as he glanced over his shoulder at the red-cloaked boy.
"So that's what you were after," Billie cried wrathfully, "poking up the river by yourself in that beastly little boat that turns over if you look at it, and you can swim about as well as a tree-toad. If it hadn't been for Stan here, you'd be absolutely drowned dead by now." The color stole back into Kit's face.
The air was balmy and fragrant, and against the amber of the western sky rose and fell numberless little clouds of insects. The birds were chirping and fluttering about me, and made their arrangements for their night's lodging, in manifest dread of the clothed tree-toad who had invaded their leafy premises.
We could not starve, or die of thirst, or faint for lack of sleep, since every bush was a bed in spite of the garapatos or wood-ticks, the snore of the tree-toad, the hoarse shriek of the macaw, and the shrill gird of the guinea- fowl. Every bed was thus free, and there was land to be got for a song, enough to grow what would suffice for two men's daily wants.
For so burly a man, and one with such a chest for the stowage of sea-breezes and monsoons, the skipper was provided with a wonderfully small voice, suggesting, as he lectured upon sea-fishing to the novices who were getting into "snarls" with their tackle hard by where he sat, the circumstance of a tree-toad discoursing from the hollow of a brave old oak.
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