THE WINTERERS 



135 



or amusing, but it makes things level by its extreme beauty. 

 ' Pearls are not equal to the whiteness of its teeth ' was said 

 of a dead dog. One may say of the live dormouse that seal- 

 skin is not equal to the softness of its coat ; and there is no 

 brown quite of its colour. 



The disappearance of the frogs, and indeed the toads, is a 

 -much more dour business ; and it is more unexpected. It is 

 more than burial, a more thorough inhumation even than the 

 caterpillars. Sometimes it 



is as fatal as the experiment 

 of Romeo and Juliet. One 

 often sees on the edge of 

 a pond a little graveyard 

 of frogs and a miserable 

 spectacle it is which had 

 died in the mud, from which 

 they should have been re- 

 surgent in the early spring. 



No one has quite fathomed the mystery of some of their 

 disappearances. 



A host of stories are current of the longevity of toads 

 immured in rock. Corresponding to these are many country 

 stories, to which insufficient attention has been paid, of the 

 re-emergence of fish from dried river or pond beds. Many 

 fish hibernate in some degree. They do not lose vitality 

 in the same degree as the bat ; but they retire in sulky 

 slumber to remote crevices. In Eastern countries there 

 are species which seal themselves up by means of some 

 secretion within mud chambers ; and some are convinced 

 that pike or perhaps other fish are capable of maintaining 

 life in the mud for a great length of time. But this is rather 

 'aestivation' than 'hibernation/ and the fish wait under the 

 caked mud for the rains of autumn. 



FROG 



