THE TOAD AS TRAVELLER 89 



and wide, and produces a beautiful, mysterious 

 effect on a still evening when the last heavy-footed 

 labourer has trudged home to his tea, leaving the 

 world to darkness and to me. 



In England we are almost as rich in toads as in 

 serpents, since there are two species, the common 

 toad, universally distributed, and the rarer natter- 

 jack, abundant only in the south of Surrey. The 

 breeding habits are the same in both species, the 

 concert-singing included, but there is a difference in 

 the timbre of their voices, the sound produced by 

 the natterjack being more resonant and musical to 

 most ears than that of the common toad. 



The music and revels over, the toads vanish, 

 each one taking his own road, long and hard to 

 travel, to his own solitary home. Their homing 

 instinct, like that of many fishes and of certain 

 serpents that hibernate in numbers together, and 

 of migrating birds, is practically infallible. They 

 will not go astray, and the hungriest raptorial 

 beasts, foxes, stoats, and cats, for example, decline 

 to poison themselves by killing and devouring 

 them. 



In the late spring or early summer one occasion- 

 ally encounters a traveller on his way back to his 

 hermitage. I met one a mile or so from the valley 

 of the Wylie, half-way up a high down, with his 

 face to the summit of Salisbury Plain. He was 

 on the bank at the side of a deep narrow path, 

 and was resting on the velvety green turf, gay 

 with little flowers of the chalk-hills eye-bright, 



