Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/242

be dry and rustle under your feet, the peculiar dry note wurrk wurrk wur r r k wurk, of the wood-frog is heard faintly by ears on the alert, borne up from some unseen pool in a woodland hollow which is open to the influences of the sun. It is a singular sound for awakening nature to make, associated with the first warmer days when you sit in some sheltered place in the woods amid the dried leaves. How moderate on her first awakening, how little demonstrative ! You may sit half an hour before you will hear another. You doubt if the season will be long enough for such oriental and luxurious slowness. But they get on nevertheless, and by to-morrow or in a day or two they croak louder and more frequently. Can you be sure that you have heard the very first wood-frog in the township croak? Ah, how weather-wise must he be! There is no guessing at the weather with him. He makes the weather in his degree, he encourages it to be mild. The weather, what is it but the temperament of the earth? and he is wholly of the earth, sensitive as its skin in which he lives, and of which he is a part. His life relaxes with the thawing ground. He pitches and tunes his voice to chord with the rustling leaves which the March wind has dried. Long before the frost is quite out he feels the influence of the spring rains