croaking and tut tut of the frogs (a sound which ducks seem to imitate, a kind of quacking, and they are both of the water), is plainly enough down there in some pool in the woods. But the shrill peeping of the hylodes locates itself nowhere in particular. It seems to take its rise at an indefinite distance over wood and hill and pasture, from clefts or hollows, in the March wind. It is not so much of the earth, earthy, as of the air, airy. It rises at once on the wind and is at home there and we are incapable of tracing it farther back. What an important part to us the little peeping hylodes acts, filling all our ears with sound in the spring afternoons and evenings, while the existence of the otter, our largest wild animal, is not betrayed to any of our senses, or at least not to more than one in a thousand.
An Irishman is digging a ditch for a foundation wall of a new shop where James Harris's shop stood. He tells me that he dug up three cannon balls just in the rear of the shop within a foot of each other and about eighteen inches beneath the surface. I saw one of them which was about three and one half inches in diameter and somewhat eaten with rust on one side. These were probably thrown into the pond by the British on the 19th of April, 1775. Shattuck says that five hundred pounds of balls were
