The flight, even under such unnatural conditions, is a really pretty performance, the surprising thing about it being the ease and grace with which the acrobat manages to take an upward turn toward the end of his course, so as always to alight head uppermost against the bole. It would be fun to see such a carnival as Audubon describes, when two hundred or more of the squirrels were at play in the evening, near Philadelphia, running up the trees and sailing away, like boys at the old game of “swinging off birches.” “Scores of them,” he says, “would leave each tree at the same moment, and cross each other, gliding like spirits through the air, seeming to have no other object in view than to indulge a playful propensity.” Compared with that, mine was a small show; but it was so much better than nothing. Two mornings later (April 30) I was walking up the main street of our village, lounging along, waiting for an electric car to overtake me, when I heard loud batrachian voices from a field on my left hand. “Aha!” said I, “the spade-foots are out again.” It had occurred to me within a day or two that this should be their season, if, as is believed, their appearance above ground is conditioned upon an unusual rainfall. Some years ago, when I was amusing myself for a little with the study of toads and frogs, checking Dr. J. A. Allen’s annotated list of the Massachusetts batrachia, I became very curious about this peculiar and little understood species, known scientifically as _Scaphiopus holbrookii_, or the solitary spade-foot. It was originally described from South Carolina, I read, and was first found in Massachusetts, near Salem, about 1810. Its cries were said to have been heard at a distance of half a mile, and were mistaken for those of young crows. For more than thirty years afterward the frogs were noticed at this place only three times. They were described as burrowing in the ground, coming forth only to spawn, and that, as far as could be ascertained, at very irregular intervals, sometimes many years in length. This, as I say, I read in Dr. Allen’s catalogue, to the great sharpening of my curiosity. If I ever heard such noises, I should be prepared to guess at the author of them. Well, some years afterward (it was almost exactly eight years ago), fresh from a first visit to Florida, where my ears had grown expectant of strange sounds (a great use of travel), I stepped out of my door one evening in late April, and was hardly in the street before I heard somewhere ahead of me a chorus of stentorian frog-notes. “That should be the spade-foot’s voice,” I said to myself, with full conviction. I hastened forward, traced the tumult to a transient pool in a field, and as I neared the place picked up a board that lay in the grass, and with it, by good fortune, turned the first frog I came in sight of into a specimen. This I sent to the batrachian specialist at Cambridge, who answered me, as I knew he would, that it was Scaphiopus.