While on the subject of eating frogs, one of many of my adventures with the animal comes upon me with something like a feeling of compunction. When I was at school, it happened on a great occasion that a party of the ‘big boys’ were allowed to sit up much beyond the ordinary time of retiring. Finding it cold, it was proposed to adjourn to the kitchen, poke up the fire, and make warm before going to bed. Proceeding accordingly, we were startled by the repetition of some heavy sounds on the floor, and on getting up a blaze we discovered a frog of gigantic proportions jumping across the room. He was seized, and a council being held upon him, it was resolved that he should be killed, roasted, and eaten; and this awful sentence was at once put into execution--the curious for curiosity, the braggarts for bravado, and the cowards, lest they be thought so, partaking of the repast. We discovered next day that the unfortunate devoured had been for three years a settled denizen of the kitchen, where he dealt nightly havoc on the hordes of crickets and cockroaches it contained. I have had for three years a frog in confinement where his food is not very abundant, and he has grown proportionally slowly, being still of a very diminutive size. Linnæus and others distinguished ours as the mute frog, believing it did not possess a voice. They were mistaken: you hear our captive, when I press his back, give utterance to his woes; but if you desire to attend his concert, get up some bright night in spring, seek out his spawning place about the witching hour, and you will then hear sounds, of strange power, which seem to make the earth on which you stand to tremble. On investigation you will find it to proceed from an assembled congregation of frogs, each pronouncing the word _Croak_, but dwelling, as a musician would say, with a thrill on the letter _r_. When speaking of the tadpole, I forgot to allude to the fact, that recent experimenters find that by placing them in covered jars, the developement of the frog is arrested. The tadpole will continue to grow until it reaches a size as great as that of an adult frog. This has been attributed by the discoverer to a withdrawal of the agency of light; but it strikes me he has, in his anxiety to prop a theory, lost sight of the true reason, which appears to be, that while he excluded the young animal from light, he also put it in such a situation as to compel it to breathe alone by its gills, and afford it no opportunity for the developement of its lungs, and so it retained of necessity its fish-like functions. As you are probably more of a sportsman than a naturalist, you have observed in rail shooting, your pointer, after a show of setting, roll on the ground: if you had examined, the chances are you would have found a dead frog of no very pleasing perfume. Why the dog so rolled, I cannot say, unless it be, that he like other puppies wished to smear his hair with nasty animal odours.