THE TOAD AS TRAVELLER 89 
and wide, and produces a _ beautiful, mysterious 
effect on a still evening when the last heavy-footed 
labourer has trudged home to his tea, leaving the 
world to darkness and to me. 
In England we are almost as rich in toads as in 
serpents, since there are two species, the common 
toad, universally distributed, and the rarer natter- 
jack, abundant only in the south of Surrey. The 
breeding habits are the same in both species, the 
concert-singing included, but there is a difference in 
the timbre of their voices, the sound produced by 
the natterjack being more resonant and musical to 
most ears than that of the common toad. 
The music and revels over, the toads vanish, 
each one taking his own road, long and hard to 
travel, to his own solitary home. Their homing 
instinct, like that of many fishes and of certain 
serpents that hibernate in numbers together, and 
of migrating birds, is practically infallible. They 
will not go astray, and the hungriest raptorial 
beasts, foxes, stoats, and cats, for example, decline 
to poison themselves by killing and devouring 
them. 
In the late spring or early summer one occasion- 
ally encounters a traveller on his way back to his 
hermitage. I met one a mile or so from the valley 
of the Wylie, half-way up a high down, with his 
face to the summit of Salisbury Plain. He was 
on the bank at the side of a deep narrow path, 
and was resting on the velvety green turf, gay 
with little flowers of the chalk-hills—eye-bright, 
