beautiful: its colour is a fine bronze-red.

Besides these varieties of frogs there lives in the garden a huge
uncouth goggle-eyed thing which, although called here hikigaeru, I take
to be a toad. 'Hikigaeru' is the term ordinarily used for a bullfrog.
This creature enters the house almost daily to be fed, and seems to have
no fear even of strangers. My people consider it a luck-bringing
visitor; and it is credited with the power of drawing all the mosquitoes
out of a room into its mouth by simply sucking its breath in. Much as it
is cherished by gardeners and others, there is a legend about a goblin
toad of old times, which, by thus sucking in its breath, drew into its
mouth, not insects, but men.

The pond is inhabited also by many small fish; imori, or newts, with
bright red bellies; and multitudes of little water-beetles, called
maimaimushi, which pass their whole time in gyrating upon the surface of
the water so rapidly that it is almost impossible to distinguish their
shape clearly. A man who runs about aimlessly to and fro, under the
influence of excitement, is compared to a maimaimushi. And there are
some beautiful snails, with yellow stripes on their shells. Japanese
children have a charm-song which is supposed to have power to make the
snail put out its horns:

Daidaimushi, [22] daidaimushi, tsuno chitto dashare! Ame haze fuku kara
tsuno chitto dashare! [23]

The playground of the children of the better classes has always been the
family garden, as that of the children of the poor is the temple court.
It is in the garden that the little ones first learn something of the
wonderful life of plants and the marvels of the insect world; and there,