The frogs! You can have no spring until you hear the frogs. The first shrill notes, heard before the ice is fairly out of the marshes, will be the waking call of the hylas, the tiny tree-frogs that later on in the summer you will find in the woods. Then, as the spring advances and this silvery sleigh-bell jingle tinkles faster, other voices will join in--the soft croak of the spotted leopard frogs, the still softer melancholy quaver of the common toad, and away down at the end of the scale the deep, solemn bass of the great bullfrog saying, “Go round! Better go round!” II You must hear, besides the first spring notes of the bluebird and the robin, four bird songs this spring. First (1) the song of the wood thrush or the hermit thrush, whichever one lives in your neighborhood. No words can describe the purity, the peacefulness, the spiritual quality of the wood thrush’s simple “Come to me.” It is the voice of the tender twilight, the voice of the tranquil forest, speaking to you. After the thrush (2) the brown thrasher, our finest, most gifted songster, as great a singer, I think (and I have often heard them both), as the Southern mockingbird. Then (3) the operatic catbird. She sits lower down among the bushes than the brown thrasher, as if she knew that, compared with him, she must take a back seat; but for variety of notes and length of song, she has few rivals. I say _she_, when really I ought to say _he_, for it is the males of most birds that sing, but the catbird seems so long and slender, so dainty and feminine, that I think of this singer as of some exquisite operatic singer in a woman’s rôle. Then (4) the bobolink; for his song is just like Bryant’s bubbling poem, only better! Go to the meadows in June and listen as he comes lilting and singing over your head. III There are some birds that cannot sing: the belted kingfisher, for instance; he can only rattle. You must hear him rattle. You can do as well yourself if you will shake a “pair of bones” or heave an anchor and let the chain run fast through the hawse-hole. You then must hear the downy woodpecker doing his rattling _rat-ta-tat-tat-tat-tat_ (across the page and back again), as fast as _rat-ta-tat_ can _tat_. How he makes the old dead limb or fence-post rattle as he drums upon it with his chisel bill. He can be heard half a mile around. Then high-hole, the flicker (or golden-winged woodpecker), you must hear him yell, _Up-up-up-up-up up-up-up-up-up-up_,--a ringing, rolling, rapid kind of yodel that echoes over the spring fields. IV You must hear the nighthawk and the whip-poor-will. Both birds are to be heard at twilight, and the whip-poor-will far into the night. At the very break of dawn is also a good time to listen to them.