tree-toads, many of them no larger than crickets, and none of them
larger than a bumblebee. There seemed to be thousands of them. The mark
of the tree-toad was the round, flattened ends of their toes. I took
some of them home, but they died the next day. Where did they come
from? I imagined the violent wind swept them off the trees in the woods
to windward of the road. But this is only a guess; maybe they crept out
of the ground, or from under the wall near by, and were out to wet
their jackets.

I have never yet heard of a frog coming down chimney in a shower. Some
circumstantial evidence may be pretty conclusive, Thoreau says, as when
you find a trout in the milk; and if you find a frog or toad behind the
fire-board immediately after a shower, you may well ask him to explain
himself.

When I was a boy I used to wonder if the clouds were hollow and carried
their water as in a cask, because had we not often heard of clouds
bursting and producing havoc and ruin beneath them? The hoops gave way,
perhaps, or the head was pressed out. Goethe says that when the
barometer rises, the clouds are spun off from the top downward like a
distaff of flax; but this is more truly the process when it rains. When
fair weather is in the ascendant, the clouds are simply reabsorbed by
the air; but when it rains, they are spun off into something more
compact: 't is like the threads that issue from the mass of flax or
roll of wool, only here there are innumerable threads, and the fingers
that hold them never tire. The great spinning-wheel, too, what a
humming it makes at times, and how the footsteps of the invisible
spinner resound through the cloud-pillared chambers!

The clouds are thus literally spun up into water; and were they not