After the Snow. 11 



their croaking sounds like a number of men calking a ship, 

 striking at variance with one another. Or perhaps we 

 should say that the calking of a ship sounds like the 

 croaking of wood-frogs, for the latter is the more natural 

 sound, and has the advantage of priority. Before Noah 

 made his boat of gopher-wood, and Jason sailed the 

 ^Egean sea, the wood-frog sang in the Spring of the year. 

 In the woods, a long way from the pool, a female frog 

 comes hopping, hopping — two long leaps and then a rest. 

 So she makes her way to the general assemblage of her 

 kind. When you stoop to pick her up she crouches closer 

 to the earth, and her colors are brighter now than at any 

 other season. The red-brown is intensified, and the dark 

 stripe on either side of the head is more marked. The 

 majority of the males are dark mottled brown, with broader 

 stripes on the head, but a few are of the same general 

 color as the females. All of the spawn is deposited in a 

 space about a yard square, and in this one pool there are 

 over fifty of the round gelatinous masses adhering to the dead 

 grass- stems and twigs. Soon the assemblages will disperse, 

 and the frogs will sing no more; they will lead solitary 

 lives until another year. 



In a swamp a cardinal bird sings from a tree-top, first 

 one and then the other of his songs : chuck — chuck — chuck, 

 rendered fast, as if calling the chickens; and hue, hue, hue, 

 repeated about a dozen times, bringing an echo from the 

 opposite hill. The notes have a particular whistling 

 sound, like a switch passed rapidly through the air, which 

 our words cannot render, and for which the cardinal alone 

 knows the alphabet. From the same swamp a peeper- 



