oft. So
with a hundred other signs, all the result of hasty and incomplete
observations.

One season, the last day of December was very warm. The bees were out
of the hive, and there was no frost in the air or in the ground. I was
walking in the woods, when as I paused in the shade of a hemlock-tree
I heard a sound proceed from beneath the wet leaves on the ground but
a few feet from me that suggested a frog. Following it cautiously up,
I at last determined upon the exact spot from whence the sound issued;
lifting up the thick layer of leaves, there sat a frog--the wood frog,
one of the first to appear in the marshes in spring, and which I have
elsewhere called the "clucking frog"--in a little excavation in the
surface of the leaf-mould. As it sat there the top of its back was
level with the surface of the ground. This, then, was its
hibernaculum; here it was prepared to pass the winter, with only a
coverlid of wet matted leaves between it and zero weather. Forthwith I
set up as a prophet of warm weather, and among other things predicted
a failure of the ice crop on the river; which, indeed, others, who had
not heard frogs croak on the 31st of December, had also begun to
predict. Surely, I thought, this frog knows what it is about; here is
the wisdom of nature; it would have gone deeper into the ground than
that if a severe winter was approaching; so I was not anxious about my
coal-bin, nor disturbed by longings for Florida. But what a winter
followed, the winter of 1885, when the Hudson became coated with ice
nearly two feet thick, and when March was as cold as January! I
thought of my frog under the hemlock and wondered how it was faring.
So one day the latter part of March, when the snow was gone, and there
was a feeling of spring in the air, I turned aside in my walk to
investigate it. The matted leaves were still frozen hard, but I
succeeded in lifting them up and exposing the frog. There it sat as
fresh and unscathed as in the fall. The ground beneath and all about
it was still frozen like a rock, but apparently it had some means of
its own of resisting the frost. It winked and bowed its head when I
touched it, but did not seem inclined to leave its retreat. Some days
later, after the frost was nearly all out of the ground, I passed
that way, and found my frog had come out of its seclusion, and was
resting amid the dry leaves. There was not much jump in it yet, but
its color was growing lighter. A few more warm d