"Well, Bob, I respect your prejudice," replied Frank, "because you don't affect to give reasons for your dislike of a perfectly innocent and very useful animal, who somehow managed to get himself a bad name long ago, and doesn't seem likely soon to outlive it. People call other people as ugly as Toads, and conclude that they have used a perfectly applicable simile; but it isn't quite determined that the Toad is so entirely void of beauty as to make it the completest type of ugliness. If you look closely at him-"

"I won't!" cried Bob, decisively.

"Very well," said Frank, good-humouredly, "then you will not see what, as I was going to tell you, you would see, if you did look closely at him, and that is, that he has very bright and beautiful eyes."

"And while you are admiring his eyes, he spits venom into your face," cried Bob. "Ough!"

"It must be some very illbred Toad that does that," said Frank; "Toads that have been properly brought up, I assure you, never do anything of the kind.”

"But Toads are venomous," said Charley.

"Not exactly," replied Frank. "The truth about the poison of Toads is this: there are a number of glands in a Toad's skin, and, as you can see in this one, there are two eminences just behind the head; all these contain an acid fluid, in appearance not unlike the juice of the sowthistle, and these glands, when pressed eject the fluid. It has been noticed that the lips of a dog, after taking up a Toad in his mouth, have become slightly swollen and inflamed from the action of the acid secretion in the toad's skin; and it is reported that a beastly half-drunken countryman, for a wager, bit off a Toad's head, and in a

HARMLESSNESS OF THE TOAD.

41

few hours his lips, tongue, and throat, became swollen to an alarming extent. In the case of the man, the chances are that he had bitten right through the two principal glands, and taken the whole of their acid contents into his mouth."

"And serve him right!" said Bob, with more disgust than grammar.

"I think so, too," said Frank. "But you see here that it was the man, and not the Toad, that was execrable," he

added. "That the taste of a Toad is decidedly objectionable is proved by the aversion of fish as well as of dogs; a pike, one of the most ravenous of eaters, has been seen to disgorge a Toad with disgust after having swallowed it, and, no doubt, set free the secretions of its skin. But the best evidence of the harmlessness of the Toad, when not improperly treated, is to be found in the accounts of those who have closely studied his character and conduct,

many of whom have kept him as a pet, and taken great pleasure in his society."

The idea of anybody keeping a Toad for a pet made Bob blush scarlet.

"A favourite amusement of those who have kept pet Toads," continued Frank, "is to hold them on their hands, and then offer them live insects to feed upon. The way the Toad takes his food is most interesting. He will eat nothing but live food. When a fly or some other small insect is put before him he regards it steadily, with his bright eyes looking full of intelligence, then moves gently towards it, and, when he is within reaching distance, darts out his tongue and returns it to his mouth with the captured insect, so rapidly, that it requires a very sharp eye to detect the motion. One pet Toad, of which an account has been written, after living for many years and being a great favourite, was set upon by a raven, which pecked out one of his eyes and otherwise bruised and injured him; it was noticed that, after this misfortune had befallen him, he had great difficulty in feeding himself, frequently missing his mark from want of his eye. Toads delight in gobbling up ants, and Mr. Husenbeth, a naturalist, who kept Toad-pets, used sometimes to give them a great treat by bringing them home part of an ant-hill and setting them down in the midst of it. He has seen his pets raise themselves on all fours and dart their tongues out right and left, evidently in the highest state of enjoyment. He would sometimes hold up one of them to the window, and amuse himself by watching the eagerness with which he caught the gnats that were buzzing about the window-panes."

"Toads live to an immense age, don't they?" asked Ned.

LIVE TOADS IN STONES, ETC.

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"I believe it is pretty well established that they do, though I have not myself had the advantage of knowing a Toad for any vast period of time," replied Frank.

"But they are found in the middle of blocks of stone and coal, where they must have been living for thousands and thousands of years," said Charley.

"I've no doubt that numbers have been so found," said Frank.

"But when the question of how they got into the close quarters in which they were found is asked, the answer is a long way from proving their antiquity. Experiments have been made which have very conclusively shown that toads cannot exist without air or food for any length of time. The supposition is, that where toads have been found in the middle of blocks of stone, or of coal, they got there when they were very young, possibly in their tadpole state, through some fissure, large enough to admit their little bodies, but not large enough to allow, them egress when they had grown; and through the fissure which had given them admission, food and moisture may afterwards have reached them sufficient to support life. But don't let this matter-of-fact explanation deprive the Toad of all romantic interest in your eyes; there's quite enough of the wonderful about him to make him interesting without the need of surrounding him with fictitious marvellousness."

Bob opened his eyes very wide at the word marvellousness, and looked down at the Toad with a growing interest.

"One Toad, especially, is famous in natural history for the extraordinary manner in which it rears its young," said Frank," the Surinam Toad."

"Do tell us about it," cried Bob; "I'd no notion Toads were so interesting."

CHAPTER V.

FRANK TELLS US ALL ABOUT THE SURINAM TOAD, BULL-FROGS, AND OTHER FROGS.

"AH!" said Frank, slily, "I had a strong belief that we should find in this field of grass something more than some of us knew when we set off to come here. Well, as to this Surinam Toad, it is the most wonderful Toad that has ever been observed, for the mother-Toad hatches her eggs in the skin of her back?"

Nobody ventured to make a remark on this astounding statement; but Bob's look of simple bewilderment honestly expressed the mental condition of the whole party of Frank's hearers.

"You may well look puzzled," said Frank; "when the statement was first made, numbers of people would not credit it; and for a long time after it was believed that young Toads were really bred in this strange manner, the explanation given of the mode in which it was accomplished was quite incorrect, and did away with half its surprisingness. What happens is really this :-the motherToad deposits her eggs or spawn by the edge of some pool of stagnant water; the father-Toad then heaps the eggs upon the mother-Toad's back, in the skin of which there are a great number of little cells which receive the eggs. At the end of about three months the eggs have all been hatched, and become perfectly formed Toads, having gone through their wonderful change from the tadpole form;