Part 2

After a day or two the little black spots in the jelly become fish-shaped, and give little wriggles from time to time, and at last come out and away from the jelly, small wrigglers, that swim about, and fasten under the weed in waggling rows.

The wriggler has a great deal to do yet before turning into a frog. The tail part of him becomes clearer, like a black thread with a fine web at either side of it, and the head of him becomes fatter and rounded, like a black pea, and we can see feathery things hanging out from behind it, which are called gills. Until it grows lungs of its own, like any respectable frog, the wriggling, black-headed creature breathes with these. The tail grows bigger and bigger from day to day, and flaps like anything, driving the little black tadpole (for that is what we call it) through the water in the bell jar, as if it were a little boat, swimming under water, with a busy paddle behind.

One day, about this time, when we are looking at the tadpoles in the jar, where it stands on the long bookcase in the study, the Imp says, "I say, Ogre, isn't it time we saw the blood moving?" And then I bring a little microscope, all bright gilt, out of its case in the cupboard. We catch one of the little tadpoles, and lay it on a slip of glass, and look at it down the long tube of the microscope. The tail of it looks huge instead of tiny, and all over it, inside it, we can see little pale blobs running to and fro; and those are the tadpole's blood. The blobs look like wee fishes swimming in narrow canals all over the tadpole's tail. When the Elf has looked as well as the Imp, we let it slip back from the slip of glass into the bowl, and see it flap away, as merrily as before.

The tadpole grows fast now, and soon two little hindlegs sprout out, and the forelegs follow them, and the little creature looks like a frog with a tail, and a very big tail at that. And then the tail begins to shrink, and every day the tadpole is more like a frog, and more like a frog, until, at last, the tail goes altogether, and there in the bell jar is a baby froglet, who is quite ready to crawl out of the water on a floating piece of cork, and begin life as a land and water gentleman instead of a mere fish.

That is the way the frog young ones grow up. Their mother does not bother about them at all. They have to do everything for themselves. And they do it very energetically. So that as soon as they begin to turn into frogs, we take them back to the pond and let them go; for if we kept them we should soon have them hopping all over the house. A house is no place for a little wet frog. He wants a pond or a muddy brook, and plenty of duckweed to hide under.

The duckweed in the pond is stirred by other things besides frogs, as I have told you already. The Elf and the Imp would be very angry with me, if I did not tell you all about the newts. For they are the most exciting of all the watery things that are not simple fishes. They are like water lizards, or like tiny water dragons, with four legs and a waving tail.

The Imp has a very particular admiration for the he-newts, and a fairy story to explain how it is that they dress in more gorgeous colours than their wives. Here is the story: Once upon a time there were two brown newts who lived in a pond. One was a he, and the other was a she, and neither of them knew which was which, or who ought to obey orders. So they swam about, and presently poked their noses up through the water-weed, and explained their difficulty to a gay old Kingfisher, who was sitting in his rainbow cloak on a bough that hung over the water. They both asked the question at once. Only one of them asked about a dozen times, and went on asking, and the other asked just once very angrily, and then said nothing more. So the Kingfisher, who was clever, knew which was which. "Why, you are the he," said the Kingfisher to the angry one, and he took a brilliant feather from his breast and gently stroked the newt from his head to his tail. And then a queer thing happened. A fiery crest appeared all along its back, and its body became emerald and spotted gold; and the little she-newt clapped her hands to see her handsome husband, and now she always does exactly what he tells her. That is all.

Well, you know, in a way that story is true, for the he-newt does really wear those vivid colours and that fiery crest along its back for just one season in the year. He wears them when he is making love to his little brown lady. He makes love gallantly-- fighting his rivals like the noble little water dragon that he is.

Newts are not any more easy to keep at home in a bowl than little frogs. They grow up from eggs, just like tadpoles, only instead of losing their tails and changing into frogs they keep their tails to swim with, and remain newts. They are not easy to keep because they are very clever at climbing. Once we did catch two of the brown lady newts, and the Imp fell splosh into the duckweed just as he was reaching out trying to catch a he. He caught the he all right, but then we had to go home best foot first, for the Imp was a lump of muddy wetness. He chattered all the way home all the same, and as soon as he had changed his clothes we all worked together, rigging up the old tadpoles bell jar with a fresh sandy bottom, and good clear water, and a floating island of cork, and a lot of duckweed. Then we emptied the jam pot full of newts into the bowl, and saw them swim gaily about examining their new home. We left them and had our tea. When we came back we looked at them again, and saw a very beautiful thing. Two of the newts had shed their skins. You know how sometimes, walking on the moor, we come across snakeskins, like hollow transparent snakes, when we can be sure that an adder has passed that way and left his old coat behind, and slipped gaily off in brighter clothes. Well, that was exactly what the newts had done. There were the newts swimming about, and there were their old skins, like pale, grey films, floating in the water. We could even see the shapes of their tiny feet and hands in the transparent filminesses.

That was all very well, but next morning, as I was getting ready to come down to breakfast, there was a shriek and clatter on the stairs, and presently the Imp, very red, came bumping in at my door to say that all the newts had vanished from the bowl, and that the housemaid had just met one as she was coming downstairs with a can of water. She had stepped over the newt on the edge of the landing, had seen it, and dropped the water-can over and over down the stairs. Would I please come? The Imp held out his pocket handkerchief with something wriggling in it. "You have got it?" I said. "Yes," said the Imp solemnly, looking back towards the door, "but don't let her know." We ran down over the bedraggled stair carpet and saw the water-can under the coat-stand, and the housemaid crying on a chair, explaining how she had seen an evil thing with four legs to it sitting on the landing. The cook was watching her, with arms akimbo, saying "Ah, me," and "Poor dear," now and again.

We ran on into the study, where we found the Elf feeling under the bookcases and tables, looking everywhere for the lost guests. We never saw the others again. But we took the one the Imp had caught back to the pond, and, as we put it in, made a vow not to keep newts again. They are the most escapable things we have ever tried to keep. Besides, they look jollier in the pond, and are probably very much happier. As the Elf said, "We should try to think how we should like it if other things collected us." It certainly would not be pleasant to be bottled up in muddy water for the little newts to see. It is far best to leave them alone, and, when we want to see them, to come quietly over the common to the edge of the pond, when we may easily see half-a-dozen water-dragons run out from the soft mud, and swim, with quick, hasty flaps of their tails, and jerky paddlings of their arms and legs, out into the depths of the pool.

When we lean out over the pond and take a handful or a netful of the duckweed, and pull it to pieces on the bank, we find some of the most daintily-shaped snails fastened among the mass of tiny pale stems. The Imp and the Elf always think that they are like very wee snakes, coiled round on themselves in little flat coils. And really they are just the same shape as those stone snails that were once alive, that grown-up people call ammonites. There is a fairy story about those stone snails that shows how other people beside the Imp and the Elf have thought them like serpents. Up in the north country there was an abbey by the sea, and in the abbey a saint lived called Hilda. And all the countryside was made dangerous for foot passengers by crowds of poisonous snakes. The folk of the country asked the saint to help them; for they could not walk abroad without fear of being bitten. They could not let their children out alone, because of the deadly things. So the saint summoned all the serpents to the abbey and, standing on the abbey steps, she turned them into stone, and as they stiffened they coiled up in flat circles like the little snails we find among the duckweed stems. That is the story, but we know now that these stones that they find are really snails that lived thousands of years ago, and have gradually been changed into stone. The duckweed snails are fine things for keeping water clear and pure, and the Imp and the Elf always have a few of them in their aquarium to prevent the water from growing green and stagnant and unhealthy. But you shall hear all about that in the last chapter of the book.

These round snails are very small, but the duck-pond is full of living things even smaller than they. When we scoop a jampot full of water out of it, and hold it up to the light we can often see wee round emerald balls rolling round the pot. They are so small that we can only see them if we look very carefully, "I should not think there can be any things smaller than those," said the Elf one hot afternoon as she blinked at the jampot in the sunlight. But there are. Why, even inside those wee round rolling balls there are tinier balls rolling and moving round, and these are quite alive, too. And, far, far smaller than these, there are little things in the pond, so little that we really cannot see them at all unless we put them under a microscope. The Duck Pond is like a little world of its own with ducks for giants, and newts for dragons, and all the tiny folk and the little snails for ordinary citizens.

But though so many of the ordinary citizens are so small, it is quite easy to grow rather fond of them. We hardly ever leave the Pond without the Imp or the Elf saying beggingly, "Let's wait till we see just one more water boatman." And then, of course, we wait, and crane our necks over the pond, and take no heed of the quacking of the ducks, or even of the splash of a young frog as he flops into into the water. All our six eyes and our three heads see nothing and think of nothing except the thing we want. And when we see him, what do you think he is? A little dark beetle with a pale ring round him, shaped like a tiny boat, comes up to the surface for air, and waits a moment, and then goes quickly off again, this way and that, rowing himself with two of his legs that are stronger than the others, and stick straight out from his body, like oars from a boat. He is the water boatman, and somehow he is so brisk and jolly that we think he must get more fun out of the pond than any other of the pond citizens. And that is why we always want to see him last, before we walk off over the parched common, and leave the quacking of the ducks to grow fainter and fainter behind us. We like to think of the water boatman cheerily rowing about and diving among the reflections of the trees. He is a fine person to invent stories about during the walk home.

III

STREAM AND DITCH

"You can have more fun with a running stream than with a pond," says the Imp. And that is because the galloping water, that leaps and runs over the pebbles, seems to do things to you all the time, while the water in a pond just stays still and lets you do things to it. A thousand games can be played with moving water; at every game it is as fresh as if no one had played with it before.

The Imp spends some of his jolliest mornings at the side of the beck, that flows down from the moorland, through a little wood not far from the house. Up on the moor it is a tiny stream, except when the big rains come, and then it is a streak of foaming white in the mist on the hillside. But, when it has left the heather and bracken and drops through the wood, it is like a little swift flowing river, with shelving rocky sides, and boulders in mid stream, and tiny waterfalls and pools and weirs. Below the wood it flows out through the meadowland of the valley, growing wider, and moving slower as it goes. Often as the Imp has been playing with the leaping water, and I have been sitting near by among the shadowy leaves of the trees, hazels and rowans, that swing over its channel, I have heard him sing over to himself the words of a poem which he knows. It is all about a stream.

"I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally, and sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley.

"I chatter over stony ways In little sharps and trebles, I bubble into eddying bays, I babble on the pebbles.

"I wind about, and in and out, With here a blossom sailing, And here and there a lusty trout, And here and there a grayling."

This is not all the song, but only his favourite verses.

The Imp builds stone on stone across the stream, and makes a bridge with a dozen piers, and flat stones laid across. Or he sets a row of big stones in the stream, so that the water gushes between them. Then he piles little stones against them, and fills the joints with moss and earth until he makes a solid dam, so that the stream rises up and up, deeper and deeper, unable to go any farther, until at last it overflows the top of the dam and, rushing down, pulls everything to pieces beneath it. That is really exciting. It is exciting, too, to make little canoes of folded paper, and put a pebble in for ballast, and let them shoot the rapid, as if there were Red Indians inside, skilfully guiding with carved and painted paddles. These are only a few of the running water games.

In a little hollow of the stream, below the waterfalls, where the falling water has churned out a basin for itself, we sometimes see a trout, silvery bellied, and dark of back, with spots along his sides. But the place where we go to look for fish and other water folk is farther down the stream, below the wood and moorland. The beck is tamer down there, and has given up leaping from ledge to ledge, but flows quietly and smoothly, with a rippling song of its own, over a broad pebbly channel between the green meadows.

Footpaths cross the meadows, and where they come to the brook, bridges have been made by simply laying a huge flat slate stone from bank to bank across the water. One of our favourite ways of picnicking is to take our basket of food across the meadows and camp in the long grass close by one of these bridges. For then we get the best of everything. The best of the meadow things, purple orchids, and kingcups, like enormous buttercups twice gilded, and the delicate butterfly orchids, who are rare indeed, with their pale green spikes, with the white flowers tinted with green, fluttering round them. There is plenty of the little blue forget-me-not growing in clumps close to the water, and ragged robin, with his touzled pink petals close under the meadow hedge. And, best of all, perhaps we see a blue flash, and then another blue flash, and then another, and we know that there is a dragon fly shooting about over the water, and among the water plants, like a small azure comet. Sometimes, when he hovers over a flower, we can see him, but we can never see his wings. They move too fast. And when he is flying about, we can see nothing but the blue glittering flash that shows that he is there.

The best of the water things, too, we get. For lying on the banks of the stream, even while we are eating our sandwiches, we can see the caddises in the muddy shallows, and sometimes a water shrimp, and often a shoal of minnows. And, when the stream is low, the Imp can crawl along, from one side of the bridge to the other, under the big slate, putting his feet and hands on the stones left dry by the water. And that is fun indeed. The Elf and I lie flat on our fronts on the stone bridge, and hang our heads over the edge, and look backwards up the tunnel. And we see the Imp start in at the other end, and come crawling under like a rat in a wet hole. We see his hands and feet clawing about for stones to rest on, and the Elf shouts to him, "There is a stone there--no, there--there, stupid!" and sometimes he finds the stone, and sometimes he does not. We hear him grunt with hotness and excitement. And usually we hear him splash, as one leg or the other slips from its resting-place into the water. And then out he comes, mightily panting, at our end of the bridge. Somehow, with a great pull, he tumbles round on to the bank. And then, because one foot is wet he must take his shoe and stocking off. And if one shoe, why not the other? And if the Imp is allowed to take his shoes and stockings off, why not the Elf? And so, in about three minutes, there are two pairs of stockings and two pair of shoes neatly laid out on the bank, and two small people paddling in the stream, playing for a little, just for the joy of feeling the water stream past their ankles, and then searching about and looking for the little folk of the stream and talking about them, and asking all sorts of questions.

The first and easiest of all the small water folk for people like the Imp and the Elf to find are the caddisworms. Do you know a stonefly when you see one? A long brown-winged dirty-looking fly; you must often have seen one skimming along a brook, and settling on the pebbles that the water has left partly dry. A caddisworm is the thing that is some day going to be a stonefly, just as caterpillars are one day going to be butterflies or moths, and just as Imps and Elves are some day going to be grown-ups. That is all very well. But it does not tell you what a caddisworm is like. This is how the children find one. They paddle to a shallow part of the stream, where it flows under grassy banks, a place where the bottom is a little muddy, instead of being covered with small round pebbles. Then they stand and look into the water, up stream, for the ripples flowing from their ankles make it impossible to see into the water clearly if they look the other way. Then, searching carefully over the bottom, they look for anything small that moves. Presently they see something. It may be a little bundle of tiny sticks, or some pieces of dead grass, or a couple of irregularly shaped twigs, moving crookedly over the sand or mud. And they know that they have found a caddisworm. One or other of them, usually the Imp, dives a hand down into the water and catches it, which is very easy to do, for caddisworms are leisurely people, and do not move much faster than snails. It is lifted out of the water and held out, looking like a little bundle of sticks in the palm of his paw. But while we watch something comes jerkily out of the end of the bundle--a black head and six busy legs, and soon the caddis is crawling along as fast as it can, dragging its house behind it. For the bundle of sticks is really a log house that the caddis has built for itself. He builds it about his own body all round him, adding stick by stick in the neatest, cleverest manner. He builds with anything he can find, and it is often possible to make him a present of a twig, and see him use it up as a new log in the walls of his house. Nothing comes amiss to him. If the stream he lives in is full of little snails, he is quite ready to cover his home with their shells. Beads, twigs, pieces of grass cut short, flat seeds, scraps of paper, anything you can think of, he will somehow manage to make useful. The odd part of it is that instead of bringing the bricks to his house, or the logs, or whatever you like to call them, he goes in his house to look for each brick, and, when he has finished his building, he carries his home about with him.

As the Imp puts the caddis back into the water he sometimes sees a sudden stirring of the mud, as if someone had poked a pencil in and pulled it quickly out again, bringing a puff of fine sediment up into the water. In the place from which the puff came is a water-shrimp, who is far harder to catch than the caddis, for he is one of the nimblest of the little dodging water-folk. It takes the Imp ten minutes and a lot of splashing before, if he is lucky, he can catch one in the hollow of his hand. Then it lies in a little puddle of water in his palm, whirling itself about, and thrashing into ripples the waters of its prison. It is very like a seaside shrimp, only smaller. It is pale, muddy brown, and looks as if it had been made of tiny napkin rings slipped over each other like a little curly telescope, with active legs and busy feelers.