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