wamp and an ear open for
bird-voices. Yes, and it comes to me at this moment that here I heard
the first and only bull-frog that I heard anywhere in Florida. It was
like a voice from home, and belonged with the fence. Other frogs I had
heard in other places. One chorus brought me out of bed in Daytona--in
the evening--after a succession of February dog-day showers. "What is
that noise outside?" I inquired of the landlady as I hastened
downstairs. "That?" said she, with a look of amusement; "that's frogs."
"It _may_ be," I thought, but I followed the sounds till they led me in
the darkness to the edge of a swamp. No doubt the creatures were frogs,
but of some kind new to me, with voices more lugubrious and homesick
than I should have supposed could possibly belong to any batrachian. A
week or two later, in the New Smyrna flat-woods, I heard in the distance
a sound which I took for the grunting of pigs. I made a note of it,
mentally, as a cheerful token, indicative of a probable scarcity of
rattlesnakes; but by and by, as I drew nearer, the truth of the matter
began to break upon me. A man was approaching, and when we met I asked
him what was making that noise yonder. "Frogs," he said. At another
time, in the flat-woods of Port Orange (I hope I am not taxing my
reader's credulity too far, or making myself out a man of too
imaginative an ear), I heard the bleating of sheep. Busy with other
things, I did not stop to reflect that it was impossible there should be
sheep in that quarter, and the occurrence had quite passed out of my
mind when, one day, a cracker, talking about frogs, happened to say,
"Yes, and we have one kind that makes a noise exactly like the bleating
of sheep." That, without question, was what I had heard in the
flat-woods. But this frog in the sugar-cane swamp was the same fellow
that on summer evenings, ever and ever so many years ago, in sonorous
bass that could be heard a quarter of a mile away, used to call from
Reuben Loud's pond, "Pull him in! Pull him in!" or sometimes (the
inconsistent amphibian), "Jug o' rum! Jug o' rum!"

I dismounted from my perch at last, and was sauntering idly along the
path (idleness like this is often the best of ornithological industry),
when suddenly I had a vision! Before me, in the leafy top of an oak
sapling, sat a blue grosbeak. I knew him on the instant. But I could see
only his head and neck, the rest of his body being hidden by the leaves.
It was a moment of fever