Uncle Dick and Lisa's Old Time Animal Tales

Out at the Lafayette Park Police station in St. Louis, they have a weather prophet which eclipses Tice and all the barometers in the neighborhood. It is a frog of the genus Hyla, more familiar to the general reader as the tree toad. The Superintendent of the Park, was mildly abusing his barometer one day for misleading him, when the officer on the beat an old frontiersman, said he would show him a trick. He took a glass jar and threw into it some stones and a couple of inches of water. Then he whittled out a little wooden ladder and put it into the jar. After some lively scrambling a tree toad was caught, chucked in and a tin top screwed on. The weather indicator was complete. When it is going to be fair weather the toad roosts on the top round of the ladder solemnly blinking the hours away. From twelve to fifteen hours before a change of bad weather, “the general,” as they call him, begins to climb down, and hours before the storm sets in he squats himself on a stone, and, with his head just above the surface of the water, peers aloft at the coming storm. Let the weather be changeable and shifting, as “Old Prob” says, and the old toad goes up and down the ladder like a scared middy. When it is fair and the toad roosts aloft his skin is of a light grayish green. When the change comes the skin turns black as the toad goes down the ladder, becoming a jet shining black by the time it reaches the bottom. The fame of the toad has spread through the Lafayette Park neighborhood.