Prepared as I was to hear something extraordinary from these animals, I confess the first frog concert I heard in America was so much beyond any thing I could conceive of the powers of these musicians, that I was truly astonished.  This performance was al fresco, and took place on the night of the 18th instant, in a large swamp, where there were at least ten thousand performers; and I really believe not two exactly in the same pitch, if the octave can possibly admit of so many divisions or shades of semitones.  An hibernian musician, who, like myself, was present for the first time at this concert of antimusic, exclaimed, “By Jasus but they stop out of tune to a nicety!"

I have been since informed by an amateur, who resided many years in this country, and made this species of music his peculiar study, that on these occasions the treble is performed by the tree-frogs, the smallest and most beautiful species; they are always of the same colour as the bark of the tree they inhabit, and their note is not unlike the chirp of a cricket:  the next in size are our counter tenors; they have a note resembling the setting of a saw.  A still larger species sing tenor; and the under part is supported by the bull-frogs; which are as large as a man’s foot, and bellow out the bass in a tone as loud and sonorous as that of the animal from which they take their name.

To an Englishman lately arrived in this country there are other phenomena, equally curious; as fire-flies, night-hawks &c.; but, above all, such tremendous peals of thunder and flashes of lightning, as can be conceived only by those who have been in southern latitudes.

I have often thought, if an enthusiastic cockney, of weak nerves, who had never been out of the sound of Bow bell, could suddenly be conveyed from his bed, in the middle of the night, and laid, fast asleep, in an american swamp, he would, on waking, fancy himself in the infernal regions:  his first sensation would be from the stings of a myriad of mosquitoes; waking with the smart, his ears would be assailed with the horrid noises of the frogs; on lifting up his eyes he would have a faint view of the night-hawks, flapping their ominous wings over his devoted head, visible only from the glimmering light of the fire-flies, which he would naturally conclude were sparks from the bottomless pit.  Nothing would be wanting at this moment to complete the illusion, but one of those dreadful explosions of thunder and lightning, so extravagantly described by Lee, in Oedipus:—­

“Call you these peals of thunder, but the yawn or bellowing clouds? by Jove, they seem to me the world’s last groans, and those large sheets of flame it’s last blaze!”

I have often traversed the woods by myself at night, and sometimes during such scenes; and though I was conscious that all round me proceeded from natural causes, I could not at these times entirely forget,