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Changeless as a sphinx, he had sat there in darkness and in light, whilst sunlight had changed to moonlight, and the songs of the birds had given place to the low murmuring of frogs from a lake below the lawns. At last it seemed that his unnatural fit had passed away. He stretched out his hand and struck a silver gong which had been left within his reach.
One question still is unresolved, Why do frogs stay and be tickled? They snap snappishly at the titillating straw; they snatch at it with their weird little hands; they parry it skilfully. They hardly can enjoy being tickled, and yet they endure, paying a dear price for the society of their betters. Frogs the frisky, frogs the spotted, were our comedy that day.
We however walked on as well as we could until near noon, at which time, from excessive weakness, we had not made more than eight miles, or about a mile and a quarter an hour, when we suddenly came out on the bed of a dried-up swamp, now looking like a desert of white sand studded with reeds. The forms of natives were seen wandering about this, one mile from us, who were searching for frogs.
The Caliph approved of the proposition of his Vizier, and went with him to the pond. When they reached it they saw a stork walking gravely to and fro, seeking for frogs, and now and then clattering at something before her. Presently they saw, too, another stork hovering far up in the air.
The frogs resumed their roaring, the night-birds lifted up their voices; the raccoon called to his fellow, and was answered away off in the forest; the pile-driver hammered away at his stake, the old owl hooted solemnly from his perch, and we retired to our tents to talk over the romance of our serenade, and to dream of Ole Bull and the Swedish Nightingale. The morning broke bright and balmy.
By a further coincidence his assistant, while playing with the machine, released a few sparks just when some of the specimens were in such contact with the surface beneath them that they were bound to react to the sudden alteration of the electric field round the machine caused by its discharge. At each spark the frogs' legs twitched.
Before he was fifteen, he had modelled and built a steam engine, and followed that with a steel railroad frog, which was so great an improvement over the frogs then in use that it was soon widely adopted, and brought the young inventor both money and reputation. He moved to Pittsburgh, as the centre of the iron and steel business, and began the manufacture of his frogs there.
A few scattered kernels of corn, perhaps on a pinch a few berries, he may pick up; though I suspect the crow is somewhat human in his tastes, and, besides animal food, affects only the cereals. The frogs are deep in the mud. Now and then a squirrel or a mouse may be had; but they are mostly dozing in their holes.
As Rikki-tikki went up the path, he heard his 'attention' notes like a tiny dinner-gong; and then the steady 'Ding-dong-lock! Nag is dead dong! Nagaina is dead! Ding-dong-tock! That set all the birds in the garden singing, and the frogs croaking; for Nag and Nagaina used to eat frogs as well as little birds. 'He saved our lives and Teddy's life, she said to her husband.
Then he dropped his foot, and showed me his silk frogs, glancing askance at the boy the while, and said that these frogs did not please him, and that he wanted to have them changed to silver buttons; but the boy did not look at the frogs either.
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