The frog and the toad suffer, in this world of injustice, from a deprival of the respect and esteem that is certainly their due. In the case of the frog this may be due largely to the animal's headlong and harlequin-like character, but the toad is a steady personage, whose solemnity of deportment, not to speak of his stoutness, entitles him to high consideration in a world where grave dulness and personal circumference always attract reverence. The opening lines of a certain famous poem have without a doubt done much to damage the dignity of the frog. "The frog he would a-wooing go" is not, perhaps, disrespectful, although flippant; but "whether his mother would let him or no" is a gross insult. Of course, it is a matter upon which no self-respecting frog ever consults his mother; but the absurd jingle is immortal, and the frog's dignity suffers by it. Then there is a certain pot-bellied smugness of appearance about the frog that provokes a smile in the irreverent. Still, the frog has received some consideration in his time. The great Homer himself did not disdain to sing the mighty battle of the frogs and mice; and Aristophanes gave the frogs a most important chorus in one of his comedies; moreover, calling the whole comedy "The Frogs," although he had his choice of title-names among many very notable characters--Æschylus, Euripides, Bacchus, Pluto, Proserpine, and other leaders of society. Still, in every way the frog and the toad are underesteemed--as though such a thing as a worthy family frog or an honourable toad of business were in Nature impossible. It is not as though they were useless. The frog's hind legs make an excellent dish for those who like it, as well as a joke for those who don't. Powdered toad held in the palm is a fine thing to stop the nose bleeding--or, at any rate, it was a couple of hundred years ago, according to a dear old almanac I have. On the same unimpeachable authority I may fearlessly affirm a smashed frog--smashed on the proper saint's day--in conjunction with hair taken from a ram's forehead and a nail stolen from a piebald mare's shoe, to be a certain remedy for ague, worn in a little leather bag. If it fails it will be because the moon was in the wrong quarter, or the mare was not sufficiently piebald, or the nail was not stolen with sufficient dishonesty, or some mistake of that sort. [Illustration: A SMALL LUNCH.]