Having a toad cross your path in Spring is supposed to bring good luck. (Fertility and long life and all that superstitious stuff.)

Fortunately, I had my camera along, so I can prove it happened. It would have been nice if the toad had cooperated a little more, but he disappeared into the foliage so quickly I was lucky to get this one.

Not the famous toad which lived in the legendary Berkeley Castle, described here:

On the left is a range of buildings containing bed-chambers and other apartments; from the ante-chamber a doorway leads into the dungeon-room, a totally dark room, in which, there is little doubt, the murder of Edward II took place. Under the floor, visible by a lantern let down through a trap-door, is the dungeon, twenty-eight feet deep, in which the wretched king's gaolers, during the latter part of his imprisonment, placed putrid carcasses, to torture and poison him by the stench. It seems a room well suited for a deed of darkness and blood!

"Out of which dungeon," says Smyth, "in the likenes of a deepe broad well, goinge steepely downe in the midst of the Dungeon Chamber in the said Keepe, was, (as tradition tells,) drawne forth a Toad in the time of Kinge Henry the Seventh, of an incredible bignes, which in the deepe dry dust, in the bottom thereof, had doubtlesse lived there divers hundreds of yeares; whose portraiture in just demension, as it was then to me affirmed by divers aged persons, I sawe, about 48 yeares agone, drawne in colours upon the doore of the great hall, and of the utter side of the stone porch leadinge into that Hall; since by pargettors or pointers of that wall washed out or outworne with time; which in bredth was more than a foot, neere 16 inches, and in length more. Of which monstrous and outgrowne beast, the inhabitants of this towne, and in the neighbour villages round about, fable many strange and incredible wonders, makinge the greatnes of this toad more than would fill a peck, yea I have beard some who looked to have beleife, say, from the report of their Fathers and Grandfathers, that it would have filled a bushell or strike, and to have beene many yeares fed with flesh and garbage from the butchers; but this is all the trueth I knowe or dare believe."

And here's where I sat and ate lunch. Nothing special; unless you wanna get Freudian.... Just a fallen tree.

Then again, it might have been felled. There is a difference, I suppose.