Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of wagons over bridges⁠—a sound heard farther than almost any other at night⁠—the baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate cow in a distant barnyard. In the meanwhile all the shore rang with the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lake⁠—if the Walden nymphs will pardon the comparison, for though there are almost no weeds, there are frogs there⁠—who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor, and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past, but mere saturation and waterloggedness and distention. The most aldermanic, with his chin upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the once scorned water, and passes round the cup with the ejaculation tr‑r‑r‑oonk, tr‑r‑r⁠—oonk, tr‑r‑r‑oonk!