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Updated: May 18, 2025
Down in the garden is a pretty brook, and something funny happened one day as I was sitting watching the tadpoles and minnows playing tag and hide-and-go-seek. All at once something gave a jump out of the water and with a loud "kerchunk," landed on a stone near by. It was Mr. Frog, and as "kerchunk" in frog language means "how do you do?" I replied politely and inquired for his health.
On burning questions such as these, Guinea-pigs and Tadpoles sunk all petty differences, and thought and felt as one man; and not the least ardent among them was Stephen. "Come on, quick! Greenfield junior," squeaked the voice of Bramble, one afternoon, as he and Stephen met on the staircase.
He raised the stones and looked for tadpoles and sticklebacks, but could find none; not a fish was visible in the water, and consequently there was not a sign of a sea-gull or a tern. Then he felt that a curse rested on the mountain, a curse so strong that it kept even the fishes and the birds away. He fell to considering the life he was leading.
He knew in a general way that all water was wet, but further than this he gave the element no thought. Thus it came about that his was the very oldest family seated in this delectable spot. The young Montgomerys could with perfect propriety claim precedence at all the stagnant pools that offered superior advantages as yielding a rich harvest of tadpoles.
Toward the end of the month, when the gelatinous masses in the water courses have developed the little black dots sufficiently so that we can see they are tadpoles, when the songsters have been joined by the catbird, the rose-breasted grosbeak, the woodthrush, the whippoorwill, the cheerful and friendly chewink and several of the warblers and flycatchers, the rivers and creeks will be fringed with the brilliant yellow of the marsh marigold, and we shall think of Shakespeare, walking the meadows of Avon, getting material for that song of the musicians in Cymbeline: And winking Mary-buds begin To ope their golden eyes.
He described to her how newts, during the breeding season, live in the water, subsisting upon tadpoles, insect larvae, and crustaceans; how, later, they make their way to the land and eat slugs and worms; and how the newly born newt has three pairs of long, plumlike, external gills.
A fat Mouse, a tender young Rabbit, a Chipmunk, a Frog, Tadpoles, Chickens, eggs, birds, fish; whatever happens to be easiest to get suits me. I am rather fond of fish, and that's one reason that I live along the Laughing Brook and around the Smiling Pool. But I like a change of fare, and so often I go hunting in the Green Forest. Sometimes I go up to Farmer Brown's for a Chicken.
The thousand little tadpoles saw him coming and fled in all directions to bury themselves in the mud at the bottom of the Smiling Pool, for when he thinks no one is looking Billy Mink sometimes gobbles up a fat tadpole for breakfast. Straight across the Smiling Pool swam Billy Mink toward the big green lily pad where Grandfather Frog sat dreaming of the days when the world was young.
For the brook, wherewith he had been familiar from his callow childhood, and wherein he was wont to quest for water-newts, and tadpoles, and caddis-worms, and other game, this brook, which afforded him very often scanty space to dabble in, and sometimes starved the cresses, was now coming down in a great brown flood, as if the banks never belonged to it.
I know him," said the kingfisher; "I often meet his first cousin down here in the pond when I'm diving. They're a low lot; a cold-blooded set; but what can you expect from a thing whose eggs are soft, and left to hatch themselves? Why, they are only tadpoles at first."
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