My spade-foots of yesterday morning were in the same spot. I could not stay then to look at them, for at that moment the car came along. I left it at a favorite place in the next township, and had gone a mile or so on foot when from another transient roadside pool I heard the spade-foot’s voice again. This was most interesting. I skirted the water, trying to get within reach of one of the performers. The attempt was unsuccessful; but in the course of it I saw for the first time the creature in the act of calling. And every time I saw him I laughed. He lay stretched out at full length upon the surface of the pool, floating high, as if he were somehow peculiarly buoyant. Then suddenly his hind parts dropped, his head flew up, his enormous white, or pinkish-white, vocal sac was instantaneously inflated (like a white ball on the water), and the grating call was given out; after which the creature’s head dropped, his hinder parts bobbed up into place (sometimes he was nearly overset by the violence of the action), and again he lay silent. This same ludicrous performance--which by the watch was repeated every three or four seconds--I observed more at length in the other pool after my return. It seems to be indulged in only so long as the frogs are unmated. I took it for the call of the male, the “lusty bachelor.” At the same moment couples lay here and there upon the water, all silent as dead men. That was yesterday afternoon. At night, as had been true the evening previous (the neighbors in at least four of the nearer houses having noticed the uproar), the chorus was loud. I could hear it from my window, perhaps a quarter of a mile distant. This morning there is no sign of batrachian life about the place. Within a very short time--long before the tadpoles, which will be hatched in two or three days, can possibly have matured--the pool will in the ordinary course of nature have dried up, and all those eggs will have gone to waste. A strange life it seems. What do the frogs live on underground? Why do they omit, year after year, to come forth and lay their eggs? Do they wait to be drowned out, and then (like thrifty farmers, who improve a wet season in which to marry) proceed to perpetuate the species? These and many other questions it would be easy to ask. Especially one would like to read from the inside the story of the life and adventures of the young, which grow from the egg to maturity--through tadpole to frog--without seeing father or mother. What a little we know! And how few are the things we see! THE WARBLERS ARE COMING They are a grand army. The Campbells are nowhere in the comparison, whether for numbers or looks. And this is their month. Let us all go out to see them and cry them welcome.