As I stood recently upon rising ground overlooking a pasture meadow that was brown as a nut with its carpet of dead grass, I noticed a long, straight line of weed-like growths still showing a tinge of green, as if the frost had spared a narrow strip of the exposed tract. Viewing it from other points, it was evident that a ditch had once been dug where these ranker grasses grew, and through long neglect it had finally been choked with weeds and almost obliterated. It was a delightful discovery. Armed with a spade, a hoe, and sundry tools of greater or less efficiency, I set out to explore this one-time watercourse, thinking it child’s play to move tons of matted weeds and mud. How much or how little I accomplished it matters not, but the fierce onslaught of unreasoning enthusiasm broke in the door of a zoölogical El Dorado. Jetsam and flotsam from the yearly freshets, showers of wind-tossed autumn leaves, a forest of rank growths that revel in the mud, all had added their quota, unchecked, to the baneful work of damming the little stream, which finally had been shut from view, but, as it proved, not wholly overcome. A narrow, tube-like channel still remained, with the mud below and upon each side almost as yielding as the water itself. Here fish, turtles, and creeping things innumerable not only lived, but wended their darksome way from the open ditch not far off to the basins of the sparkling springs at the hill-foot. I had discovered a hidden highway, a busy thoroughfare that teemed with active life. Except with those forms of life that by their construction are solely adapted to a subterranean existence, as the earth-worm, or to a fixed one, as the oyster, we commonly associate our familiar forms of wild animals with unlimited freedom of movement, and suppose that they have the wide world before them to wander where they list; and, again, that of creatures as high in the scale as fishes and upward the supposition is that in proportion to their freedom of movement are their chances of escape when pursued. Now these, like many another common impression, are true in a general way, but fairly bristle with exceptions. For instance, there are many extremely sluggish fishes, yet what creatures are more agile and swift than the minnows in our brooks? And there are fishes that can walk on the mud with their bodies entirely out of the water. Dr. Gunther tells us that “the Barramunda is said to be in the habit of going on land, or at least on mud-flats; and this assertion appears to be borne out by the fact that it is provided with a lung.... It is also said to make a grunting noise, which may be heard at night for some distance.”