84 SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS 



because he does not date back to the Flood, it need not 

 follow that he cannot remember Queen Elizabeth. There 

 are some toads-in-a-hole, indeed, which, however we may 

 account for the origin of their legend, are on the very face 

 of it utterly incredible. For example, there is the favour- 

 ite and immensely popular toad who was extracted from a 

 perfectly closed hole in a marble mantelpiece. The impli- 

 cation of the legend clearly is that the toad was coeval 

 with the marble. But marble is limestone, altered in tex- 

 ture by pressure and heat, till it has assumed a crystalline 

 structure. In other words we are asked to believe that 

 that toad lived through an amount of fiery heat sufficient 

 to burn him up into fine powder, and yet remains to tell 

 the tale. Such a toad as this obviously deserves no credit. 

 His discoverers may have believed in him themselves, but 

 they will hardly get other people to do so. 



Still, there are a great many ways in which it is quite 

 conceivable that toads might get into holes in rocks or 

 trees so as to give rise to the common stories about them, 

 and might even manage to live there for a considerable 

 time with very small quantities of food or air. It must be 

 remembered that from the very nature of the conditions 

 the hole can never be properly examined and inspected 

 until after it has been split open and the toad has been ex- 

 tracted from it. Now, if you split open a tree or a rock, and 

 find a toad inside it, with a cavity which he exactly fills, it 

 is extremely difficult to say whether there was or was not a 

 fissure before you broke the thing to pieces with your 

 hatchet or pickaxe. A very small fissure indeed would be 

 quite sufficient to account for the whole delusion ; for if the 

 toad could get a little air to breathe slowly during his torpid 

 period, and could find a few dead flies or worms among the 

 water that trickled scantily into his hole, he could manage to 

 drag out a peaceful and monotonous existence almost indefi- 



