134 NOTES BY THE WAY. 



it instantly ceases, and you may watch for an hour 

 without again hearing it. Is it a frog, I said, the 

 small tree-frog, the piper of the marshes repeating 

 his spring note but little changed amid the trees ? 

 Doubtless it is, yet I must see him in the very act. 

 So I watched and waited, but to no purpose, till one 

 day, while bee-hunting in the woods, I heard the 

 sound proceed from beneath the leaves at my feet. 

 Keeping entirely quiet, the little musician presently 

 emerged, and lifting himself up on a small stick, his 

 throat palpitated and the plaintive note again came 

 forth. " The queerest frog ever I saw," said a youth 

 who accompanied me, and whom I had enlisted to 

 help solve the mystery. No ; it was no frog or toad 

 at all, but the small red salamander, commonly called 

 lizard. The color is not strictly red, but a dull or- 

 ange, variegated with minute specks or spots. This 

 was the mysterious piper, then, heard from May till 

 November through all our woods, sometimes on trees, 

 but usually on or near the ground. It makes more 

 music in the woods in autumn than any bird. It is a 

 pretty, inoffensive creature, walks as awkwardly as a 

 baby, and may often be found beneath stones and old 

 logs ;n the woods, where, buried in the mould, it 

 passes the winter. (I suspect there is a species of lit- 

 tle frog Pickering's hylodes that also pipes occa- 

 sionally in the woods.) I have discovered, also, that 

 we have a musicaJ spader. One sunny April day, 

 tthile seated on the borders of *he woods, my atten- 

 tion was attracted by a soft, uncertain purring sound 



