SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPEES 85 



nitely. Here are a few possible cases, any one of which 

 will quite suffice to give rise to at least as good a toad-in-the- 

 hole as ninety-nine out of a hundred published instances. 



An adult toad buries himself in the mud by a dry pond, 

 and gets coated with a hard solid coat of sun-baked clay. 

 His nodule is broken open with a spade, and the toad him- 

 self is found inside, almost exactly filling the space within 

 the cavity. He has only been there for a few months at the 

 outside ; but the clay is as hard as a stone, and to the bucolic 

 mind looks as if it might have been there ever since the 

 Deluge. Good blue lias clay, which dries as solid as lime- 

 stone, would perform this trick to perfection ; and the toad 

 might easily be relegated accordingly to the secondary 

 ages of geology. Observe, however, that the actual toads 

 so found are not the geological toads we should naturally 

 expect under such remarkable circumstances, but the 

 common everyday toads of modern England. This shows 

 a want of accurate scientific knowledge on the part of the 

 toads which is truly lamentable. A toad who really wished 

 to qualify himself for the post ought at least to avoid pre- 

 senting himself before a critical eye in the foolish guise of an 

 embodied anachronism. He reminds one of the Roman 

 mother in a popular burlesque, who suspects her son of 

 smoking, and vehemently declares that she smells tobacco, 

 but, after a moment, recollects the historical proprieties, 

 and mutters to herself, apologetically, ' No, not tobacco ; 

 that's not yet invented.' A would-be silurian or triassic 

 toad ought, in like manner, to remember that in the ages 

 to whose honours he aspires his own amphibian kind was 

 not yet developed. He ought rather to come out in the 

 character of a ceratodus or a labyrinthodon. 



Again, another adult toad crawls into the hollow of a 

 tree, and there hibernates. The bark partially closes over 

 the slit by which he entered, but leaves a little crack by 



