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Updated: May 12, 2025
You are jealous of the moments, and so are up at three o'clock long before the sun sets you the example. You go out into the silence and sit under a tree, and watch and watch and wait and wait. It is very dark the nightingales have gone to bed, all the mysterious noises of night's forenoon have ceased the crickets are asleep, the tree-toad has found a nest even the stars have slunk away.
On one occasion, while walking in the woods in early May, I heard the voice of a tree-toad but a few yards from me. Cautiously following up the sound, I decided, after some delay, that it proceeded from the trunk of a small soft maple; the tree was hollow, the entrance to the interior being a few feet from the ground.
"When we first came here" remarked Tom, "mother could not sleep for the noise they and the tree-toads made." "The voice of the tree-toad is very loud for so small a creature, but the katydid has really no voice at all." "No voice, uncle?" "No, Annie; the chirp of all kinds of grasshoppers is produced by their thighs rubbing against their wing-cases."
As he began his speech, a tree-toad that had dropped down out of the tree thought to return to its lookout to see if rain were coming. As the shortest cut it took the man as a post. Scrambling over his yawning, untanned ankle jack-boots, it slipped under the equally yawning blue jeans. He commenced to scale the leg as the preacher became conscious of the invasion.
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, coining 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.
The night's cleanup of twelve hours' work was a big one three pans full of gold. Later Still more yet. A cleanup of nine thousand dollars and three of the largest nuggets I ever saw has just been made this evening. Two of the nuggets were long and flat, as large as a tree-toad, and much the shape of one.
Daisy had a picnic for the dolls on the lawn, so that Nan might see the fun if she could not join in it. Tommy turned his best somersaults to console her; Demi sat on the steps reading aloud to himself, which amused Nan a good deal; and Dan brought a little tree-toad to show her as the most delicate attention in his power.
The ground was frozen on the surface, and the toad was, of course, torpid. During the present season, I obtained additional proof of the fact that the tree-toad hibernates on dry land. The 12th of November was a warm, spring-like day; wind southwest, with slight rain in the afternoon, just the day to bring things out of their winter retreats.
Heat lightning had been playing for an hour or more in the gloomy west; a tree-toad in a nearby elm was prophesying thunder in unmelodious song: night-birds fluttered restlessly among the lofty branches; widely separated whiffs of a freshening wind came around the corner of the house. All of these had a barometric meaning to the wistful group. There was a thunderstorm on the way.
The sun, barring a veiled white glister in a clouded gray sky, betokening the solar focus, disappeared; the wind fell; the very cicadæ, so loud in the latter days of August, were dulled to long intervals of silence; in the distance, a tree-toad called and called, with plaintive iteration, for rain.
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