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.