The Face of the Fields

by Dallas Lore Sharp

Small wonder if they have never met! for this gray, squat, disc-toed little monster in the hole, or flattened on the bark of the tree like a patch of lichen, may well be one of those things which are hidden from the sharp-eyed owl. Whatever purpose be attributed to his peculiar shape and color,—protective, obliterative, mimicking,—it is always a source of fresh amazement, the way this largest of our hylas, on the moss-marked rind of an old tree, can utterly blot himself out before your staring eyes.

The common toads and all the frogs have enemies enough, and it would seem from the comparative scarcity of the tree-toads that they must have enemies, too, but I do not know who they are. The scarcity of the tree-toads is something of a puzzle, and all the more to me, that, to my certain knowledge, this toad has lived in the old Baldwin tree, now, for five years. Perhaps he has been several, and not one; for who can tell one tree-toad from another? Nobody; and for that reason I made, some time ago, a simple experiment, in order to see how long a tree-toad might live, unprotected, in his own natural environment.

Upon moving into this house, about seven years ago, we found a tree-toad living in the big hickory by the porch. For the next three springs he reappeared, and all summer long we would find him, now on the tree, now on the porch, often on the railing and backed tight up against a post. Was he one or many? we asked. Then we marked him; and for the next four years we knew that he was himself alone. How many more years he might have lived in the hickory for us all to pet, I should like to know; but last summer, to our great sorrow, the gypsy-moth killers, poking in the hole, did our little friend to death.

He was worth many worms.

It was interesting, it was very wonderful to me, the instinct for home—the love for home I should like to call it—that this humble little creature showed. A toad is an amphibian to the zoölogist; an ugly gnome with a jeweled eye to the poet; but to the naturalist, the lover of life for its own sake, who lives next door to his toad, who feeds him a fly or a fat grub now and then, who tickles him to sleep with a rose leaf, who waits as thirstily as the hilltop for him to call the summer rain, who knows his going to sleep for the winter, his waking up for the spring—to such an one the jeweled eye and the amphibious habits are but the forewords of a long, marvelous life-history.

This small tree-toad had a home, had it in his soul, I believe, precisely where John Howard Payne had it, and where many another of us has it. He had it in a tree, too,—in a hickory tree, this one that dwelt by my house; he had it in an apple tree, that one yonder across the meadow.

“East, west,

Hame’s best,”

croaked our tree-toad in a tremulous, plaintive minor that wakened memories in the vague twilight of more old, unhappy, far-off things than any other voice I ever knew.

These two tree-toads could not have been induced to trade houses, the hickory for the apple, because a house to a toad means home, and a home is never in the market. There are many more houses in the land than homes. Most of us are only real-estate dealers. Many of us have never had a home; and none of us has ever had more than one. There can be but one—mine—and that has always been, must always be, as imperishable as memory, and as far beyond all barter as the gates of the sunset are beyond my horizon’s picket fence of pines.