290 EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS. 
a 
croaking and tut tut of the frogs (a sound which 
ducks seem to imitate, a kind of quacking , and 
they are both of the water), is plainly enough 
down there in some pool in the woods. But 
the shrill peeping of the hylodes locates itself 
nowhere in particular. It seems to take its rise 
at an indefinite distance over wood and hill and 
pasture, from clefts or hollows, in the March 
wind. It is not so much of the earth, earthy, 
as of the air, airy. It rises at once on the wind 
and is at home there and we are incapable of 
tracing it farther back. What an important 
part to us the little peeping hylodes acts, filling 
all our ears with sound in the spring afternoons 
and evenings, while the existence of the otter, 
our largest wild animal, is not betrayed to any 
of our senses, or at least not to more than one 
in a thousand. 
An Irishman is digging a ditch for a founda¬ 
tion wail of a new shop where James Harris’s 
shop stood. He tells me that he dug up three 
cannon balls just in the rear of the shop within 
a foot of each other and about eighteen inches 
beneath the surface. I saw one of them which 
was about three and one half inches in diame¬ 
ter and somewhat eaten with rust on one side. 
These were probably thrown into the pond by 
the British on the 19th of April, 1775. Shat- 
tuck says that five hundred pounds of balls were 
