Near our house, out in the sylvan Salamis Estates, there is a pond.
We fear we cannot describe this pond to you in a way to carry
conviction. You will think we exaggerate if we tell you, with honest
warmth, how fair the prospect is. Therefore, in sketching the scene,
we will be austere, churlish, a miser of adjectives. We will tell
you naught of sun-sparkle by day where the green and gold of April
linger in that small hollow landskip, where the light shines red
through the faint bronze veins of young leaves--much as it shines
red through the finger joinings of a child's hand held toward the
sun. We will tell you naught of frog-song by night, of those
reduplicated whistlings and peepings. We will tell you naught of....
No, we will be austere.
On one side, this pond reflects the white cloudy bravery of fruit
trees in flower, veterans of an orchard surviving an old farmhouse
that stood on the hilltop long ago. It burned, we believe: only a
rectangle of low stone walls remains. Opposite, the hollow is
overlooked by a bumpy hillock fringed with those excellent dark
evergreen trees--shall we call them hemlocks?--whose flat fronds
silhouette against the sky and contribute a feeling of mystery and
wilderness. On this little hill are several japonica trees, in
violent ruddy blossom; and clumps of tiger lily blades springing up;
and bloodroots. The region prickles thickly with blackberry
brambles, and mats of honeysuckle. Across the pond, looking from the
waterside meadow where the first violets are, your gaze skips (like
a flat stone deftly flung) from the level amber (dimpled with
silver) of the water, through a convenient dip of country where the
fields are folded down below the level of the pool. So the eye,
skittering across the water, leaps promptly and cleanly to blue
ranges by the Sound, a couple of miles away. All this, mere
introduction to the real theme, which is Tadpoles.
We intended to write a poem about those tadpoles, but Endymion tells
us that Louis Untermeyer has already smitten a lute on that topic.
We are queasy of trailing such an able poet. Therefore we celebrate
these tadpoles in prose. They deserve a prose as lucid, as limpid,
as cool and embracing, as the water of their home.
Coming back to tadpoles, the friends of our youth, shows us that we
have completed a biological cycle of much import. Back to tadpoles
in one generation, as the adage might have said. Twenty-five years
ago we ourself were making our first acquaintance with these
friendly creatures, in the immortal (for us) waters of Cobb's Creek,
Pennsylvania. (Who was Cobb, we wonder?) And now our urchins, with
furious glee, applaud their sire who wades the still frosty quags
of our pond, on Sunday mornings, to renew their supply of tads. It
is considered fair and decent that each batch of tadpoles should
live in their prison (a milk bottle) only one week. The following
Sunday they go back to the pond, and a new generation take their
places. There is some subtle kinship, we think, between children and
tadpoles. No childhood is complete until it has watched their sloomy
and impassive faces munching against the glass, and seen the gradual
egress (as the encyclopædia pedantically puts it) of their tender
limbs, the growing froggishness of their demeanour.
Some time when you are exploring in the Britannica, by the way,
after you have read about Tactics and William Howard Taft, turn to
the article on Tadpoles and see if you can recognize them as
described by the learned G.A.B. An amusing game, we submit, would be
to take a number of encyclopædia descriptions of familiar things,
and see how many of our friends could identify them under their
scientific nomenclature.
But it is very pleasant to dally about the pond on a mild April
morning. While the Urchiness mutters among the violets, picking blue
fistfuls of stalkless heads, the Urchin, on a plank at the
waterside, studies these weedy shallows which are lively with all
manner of mysterious excitement, and probes a waterlogged stump in
hope to recapture Brer Tarrypin, who once was ours for a short
while. Gissing (the juvenile and too enthusiastic dog) has to be
kept away from the pond by repeated sticks thrown as far as possible
in another direction; otherwise he insists on joining the tadpole
search, and, poking his snout under water, attempts to bark at the
same time, with much coughing and smother.
The tadpoles, once caught, are taken home in a small yellow pail.
They seem quite cheerful. They are kept, of course, in their native
fluid, which is liberally thickened with the oozy emulsion of moss,
mud, and busy animalculæ that were dredged up with them in clutches
along the bottom of the pond. They lie, thoughtful, at the bottom of
their milk bottle, occasionally flourishing furiously round their
prison. But, since reading that article in the Britannica, we are
more tender toward them. For the learned G.A.B. says: "A glandular
streak extending from the nostril toward the eye is the lachrymal
canal." Is it possible that tadpoles weep? We will look at them
again when we go home to-night. We are, in the main, a kind-hearted
host. If they show any signs of effusion....
[Illustration]