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Come, instantly; or with my magic I'll turn you into a fantastic, dancing bug, such as those that straddle there upon the waters of the spring, or else into a fat pollywog that wiggles in the black ooze among the dead leaves and rotting bits of wood."
"I'm beginning to think this is a wild goose chase," began Billy, as at noon Frank landed, took his bearings, and then announced that they were within a few minutes of the spot in which the ship ought to lie. "She seems as elusive as the fur-bearing pollywog," announced the professor. "You still believe there is such a creature?" asked Harry.
His eyes are also adapted to looking upward, discerning dimly dangers from above, and whatever else catches the attention of a bottom-loving pollywog. His mouth is well below, as best suits bottom mumbling. Compared with these polloi pollywogs, Redfins were as hummingbirds to quail.
There is not a fish or any other living thing in all the 2,500 to 3,000 square miles of beautiful and mysterious waters, except the yearly increasing swarms of summer bathers. Not a shark, or a stingaree, to scare the timid swimmer or floater; not a minnow, or a frog, a tadpole, or a pollywog nothing that lives, moves, swims, crawls or wiggles. It is the ideal sea-bathing place of the world.
A draught from the vacuum bottle containing hot coffee which Frank carried soon restored the professor and he was able to describe to them how, as he was walking along, declaiming concerning the fur-bearing pollywog, the ground seemed to suddenly open under his feet and he felt himself tumbling into an abyss of unknown depth.
But one cloudy morning he happened to think of them, and decided that he would run over there and see how they were getting along. So off he started, lipperty-lipperty-lip. He wondered if those pollywog children of Old Mr. Toad would be much changed. The last time he saw them some of them had just begun to grow legs, although they still had long tails.
"Hee-poof I've swallowed a pollywog, Mr. Beebe, water's wonderful, water's simply ripping." "Water's not so bad," said George, reappearing from his plunge, and sputtering at the sun. "Water's wonderful. Mr. Beebe, do." "Apooshoo, kouf." Mr. Beebe, who was hot, and who always acquiesced where possible, looked around him.
Peter stared. Could it be that that ugly-looking bug was as dangerous an enemy to the baby Toad as Reddy Fox is to a baby Rabbit? He began to suspect so, and a little later he knew so, for there was that same little pollywog trying hard to swim and making bad work of it, because he had lost half of his long tail.
The professor, as he received the little slips of paper, scattered them into tiny bits and threw them overboard. "You are quite sure you have not been fooled also on the fur-bearing pollywog?" asked Frank. "Quite," replied the professor, solemnly. "Professor Tapper is one of our greatest savants." "But so was your friend who told you the Patagonians were a friendly tribe," argued Frank.
At last the epidemic reached an acute stage and the Pollywog Patrol, after a glorious career of nine days, was struck a mortal blow, never to be heard of again except in the pages of history.
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