FROG STONE.
The King Frog has in its head a stone of immense value. “The Frog Stone” (Clach nan gilleadha cràigein) is said by Pennant to be merely a kind of fossil tooth, known as bufonite. It has been made the best known of this class of physical charms, from Shakespeare’s comparison of adversity to the toad, which, though “ugly and venomous,” yet “wears a precious jewel in its head.”
The swamp at Achagaval in Morvern was tenanted by a King Frog or Toad, the reputation of which was widespread. It was called Seid, a word of which the usual meaning is “a truss of hay or straw.” One, who stayed in the neighbourhood of the fen, said, he heard, not once but scores of times, the cry of the animal from as great a distance as the top of a neighbouring hill, Beinn nam Bearrach, and he could compare it to nothing so much as the yelping of “a soft mastiff whelp” (bog chuilein tòdhlair). The part of the fen which the King Frog most frequented was called Lòn na Seid, and in winter, when it was frozen over, a tame otter was let down through a hole in the ice in the hope of driving the frog to the opening. Otters must come occasionally to the surface to breathe, and the one in question having come for that purpose, its owner, in his eagerness to secure the jewel, mistook it for the King Frog, and gave it a rap on the head that killed it on the spot.