The head was buffy yellow, changing to bittersweet orange back of the
eyes and on the gills. The body was dotted with a host of minute
specks of gold and silver. On the sides and below, this gave place to
a rich bronze, and then to a clear, iridescent silvery blue. The eye
proper was silvery white, but the upper part of the eyeball fairly
glowed with color. In front it was jet black flecked with gold,
merging behind into a brilliant blue. Yet this patch of jeweled tissue
was visible only rarely as the tadpole turned forward, and in the
opaque liquid of the mica pool must have ever been hidden. And even if
plainly seen, of what use was a shred of rainbow to a sexless tadpole
in the depths of a shady pool!
With high-arched fins, beginning at neck and throat, body compressed
as in a racing yacht, there could be no bottom life for Guinevere.
Whenever she touched a horizontal surface,--whether leaf or twig,--she
careened; when she sculled through a narrow passage in the floating
algæ, her fins bent and rippled as they were pressed bodywards. So she
and her fellow brood lived in mid-aquarium, or at most rested lightly
against stem or glass, suspended by gentle suction of the complex
mouth. Once, when I inserted a long streamer of delicate water-weed,
it remained upright, like some strange tree of carboniferous memory.
After an hour I found this the perching-place of fourteen Redfin tads,
and at the very summit was Guinevere. The rest were arranged nearly
in altitudinal size--two large tadpoles being close below Guinevere,
and a bevy of six tiny chaps lowest down. All were lightly poised,
swaying in mid-water, at a gently sloping angle, like some unheard-of,
orange-stained, aquatic autumn foliage.
For two weeks Guinevere remained almost as I have described her,
gaining slightly in size, but with little alteration of color or
pattern. Then came the time of the great change: we felt it to be
imminent before any outward signs indicated its approach. And for four
more days there was no hint except the sudden growth of the hind legs.
From tiny dangling appendages with minute toes and indefinite knees,
they enlarged and bent, and became miniature but perfect frog's limbs.
She had now reached a length of two inches, and her delicate colors
and waving fins made her daily more marvelous. The strange thing about
the hind limbs was that, although so large and perfect, they were
quite useless. They could not even be unflexed; and other mere
pollywogs near by were wriggling toes, calves, and thighs while yet
these were but imperfect buds. When she dived suddenly, the toes
occasionally moved a little; but as a whole, they merely sagged and
drifted like some extraneous things entangled in the body.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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