They all agreed that, frequently in June or July, and sometimes even in August, after a short but heavy shower of rain, the ground would suddenly be covered with myriads of small toads, and no one could say whence they came, or whither, after a little while, they went. The rain, they said, must fall in thick heavy drops, and was generally accompanied by sunshine. Long-continued rain, they added, never bred toads, and for that reason, I suppose, the phenomenon never manifested itself during the moist summer of 1838, which I spent in the steppe. Of the numbers of these toads, they recount strange stories. Millions and millions are seen covering the ground, like an army of locusts. It is quite disgusting to walk among them, for in stepping on the ground, a man may crush forty or fifty of them at once. One man told me his stomach had fairly turned on beholding a Russian run barefooted tlu-ough the unsightly mass, with the crushed bodies and the mangled limbs of the dying reptiles adhering to liis feet. The wheels of a cart, I was told, would be saturated with the juices of the dead toads, and incrusted with their loathsome bodies. In size they are stated to be all extremely diminutive, about as large as the young toads that appear early in spring, but much more lively and active. Immediately after the shower, they ai-e seen in the greatest numbers ; but they soon disappear, and on the following day not a trace is to be found of them, nor is it observed that, after one of these showers, the number of toads by which the rivers and ponds are peopled is ever materially increased. If you ask the people what they think to be the cause of these phenomena, the Russian will shrug his shoulders and say, Bog snayet (God knows) ; while a Greek will perhaps refer you to the devil for the required information. An intelligent German, to whom I appealed, owned his inability to account for the thing. " It appears very marvellous," he said, " but I cannot for a moment believe that the creatures which we see after one of these toadshowers can be the young of our common toads ; for, in the first place, we know that the young have their fixed season — namely, in spring — when they may be daily watched at their gambols, and may be seen to grow larger and larger as they grow older, but these shower-toads are seen sometimes as late as August ; in the next place, it seems to me impossible that our common toads could produce all at once such enormous multitudes of young ones ; and besides, how does it happen that all these shower-toads disappear almost as suddenly as they come ? I believe they come and go with the rain, but I don't know how to account for it."
Lizards are also numerous, and sometimes not less than eig-hteen inches long. A Cossack looks upon them with great dread ; but a Cossack stands in awe of every animal formed differently from his horse, his ox, or his dog.
Of all reptiles, however, the snake is the most abundant, though much less so in those parts of the country that are most thickly settled, particularly in those where the German colonists have been located, for the Southern Russian is generally too much afraid of a snake to kill it, even though it take up its abode under the same roof with him. " Let a snake alone," says the Russian, " and he will let you alone ; but if you kiU it, its whole race will persecute you." They believe in the existence of something of a corporation spirit among the snakes, and maintain that the relatives of a dead snake will never rest till they have avenged his death. In support of this belief, they appeal to the 28th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, where it is said : " And when Paul had gathered a bundle of sticks, and laid them on the fire, there came a viper out of the heat," and fastened on his hand. And when the barbarians saw the venomous beast hang on his hand, they said among themselves. No doubt tliis man is a murderer, whom, though he hath escaped the sea, yet vengeance sutfereth not to live." The expression " murderer," in this passage, they interpret to mean a murderer of snakes, and the " vengeance " to mean the vengeance of a snake on one that has dyed his hand in the blood of some other snake. The snake, they believe, is in the habit of dispensing poetical justice towards murderers in general, but more particularly towards those worst of murderers, the killers of snakes.