When Life Was Young: At the Old Farm in Maine

by C. A. Stephens

"Well, Ruth, I should think it would give the toad a start, too," the Old Squire would comment, dryly.

Meantime Ellen or Addison would proceed to capture the toad—a fine, big brown chunk of a toad—and exile him to the garden. Once Ellen carried him, wriggling in the tongs, around to the back side of the west barn. Ad, too, carried him out into the orchard one night. But by the next day, or the day following, toady would be back at the foot of the bulkhead stairs again. There is no doubt that it was the same toad, and he certainly must have possessed a good sense of locality. We could not for some time imagine how he obtained entrance to the cellar, for he returned to his favorite cool spot on days when the outer bulkhead door was closed. Addison at length decided that he must have got in by way of the cellar drain, on the back side of the house.

It was contrary to all the homely traditions at the farm to kill or maltreat a toad. Not less than seven times was that toad carefully carried away into the garden, or down the lane.

At last Gram's patience was exhausted. Her ire rose. "I'll see if you come back into my cellar again, old fellow," she exclaimed, before breakfast one morning after the recusant batrachian had been transported the night before. This time the old lady seized the tongs herself, and marched out into the yard, holding toady with no gentle pinch on his rotund body.

"Ellen, you bring me a quart of that brine out of the beef barrel," she called back to the kitchen.

Then having put the toad down in the cart road leading out into the fields, she dashed him with brine, and as he hopped away pursued him with further douches.

It is not likely that the brine injured the reptile very much, but for some reason it never came back.

For a long time thereafter the Old Squire was accustomed to touch up Gram's conscience now and then, by making sly allusion to her hard-heartedness and cruelty in "pickling toads." The Old Squire, too, had his bucolic enemies as well as Gram.

Wheet-wh-wh-wh-wh-wheedle! was a note we now began to hear daily about the stone walls and in the fields of new clover.

"Oh, those wood-chucks!" the old gentleman would exclaim. "They are making shocking work over in that new piece. Boys, I'll give you five cents a head for every wood-chuck you will kill off."