16 A SHARP LOOKOUT. 



a rule, when it is dry in one part of the continent it 

 is wet in some other part, and vice versa. When he 

 kills his hogs in the fall, if the pork be very hard and 

 solid he predicts a severe winter ; if soft and loose, 

 the opposite ; again overlooking the fact that the kind 

 of food and the temperature of the fall make the 

 pork hard or make it soft. So with a hundred other 

 signs, all the result of hasty and incomplete observa- 

 tions. 



One season, the last day of December was very 

 warm. The bees were out of the hive, and there was 

 no frost in the air or in the ground. I was walking 

 in the woods, when as I paused in the shade of a 

 hemlock-tree I heard a sound proceed from beneath 

 the wet leaves on the ground but a few feet from me 

 that suggested a frog. Following it cautiously up, I at 

 last determined upon the exact spot from whence the 

 sound issued ; lifting up the thick layer of leaves, there 

 sat a frog the wood frog, one of the first to appear 

 in the marshes in spring, and which I have elsewhere 

 called the " clucking frog " in a little excavation in 

 the surface of the leaf mould. As it sat there the 

 top of its back was level with the surface of the 

 ground. This, then, was its hibernaculum ; here it 

 was prepared to pass the winter, with only a coverlid 

 of wet matted leaves between it and zero weather. 

 Forthwith I set up as a prophet of warm weather, 

 and among other things predicted a failure of the ice 

 crop on the river ; which, indeed, others, who had 

 not heard frogs croak on the 31st of December, had 



