14 SIGNS AND SEASONS 



kind of weathercock, and will tell you that the way 

 it points at night indicates the direction of the wind 

 the following day. So, also, every new moon is 

 either a dry moon or a wet moon, dry if a powder- 

 horn would hang upon the lower limb, wet if it 

 would not; forgetting the fact that, as 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 he 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 

 observations. 



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 sur- 

 face 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 pre- 



