These round snails are very small, but the duck-pond is full of living things even smaller than they. When we scoop a jampot full of water out of it, and hold it up to the light we can often see wee round emerald balls rolling round the pot. They are so small that we can only see them if we look very carefully, "I should not think there can be any things smaller than those," said the Elf one hot afternoon as she blinked at the jampot in the sunlight. But there are. Why, even inside those wee round rolling balls there are tinier balls rolling and moving round, and these are quite alive, too. And, far, far smaller than these, there are little things in the pond, so little that we really cannot see them at all unless we put them under a microscope. The Duck Pond is like a little world of its own with ducks for giants, and newts for dragons, and all the tiny folk and the little snails for ordinary citizens. But though so many of the ordinary citizens are so small, it is quite easy to grow rather fond of them. We hardly ever leave the Pond without the Imp or the Elf saying beggingly, "Let's wait till we see just one more water boatman." And then, of course, we wait, and crane our necks over the pond, and take no heed of the quacking of the ducks, or even of the splash of a young frog as he flops into into the water. All our six eyes and our three heads see nothing and think of nothing except the thing we want. And when we see him, what do you think he is? A little dark beetle with a pale ring round him, shaped like a tiny boat, comes up to the surface for air, and waits a moment, and then goes quickly off again, this way and that, rowing himself with two of his legs that are stronger than the others, and stick straight out from his body, like oars from a boat. He is the water boatman, and somehow he is so brisk and jolly that we think he must get more fun out of the pond than any other of the pond citizens. And that is why we always want to see him last, before we walk off over the parched common, and leave the quacking of the ducks to grow fainter and fainter behind us. We like to think of the water boatman cheerily rowing about and diving among the reflections of the trees. He is a fine person to invent stories about during the walk home. III STREAM AND DITCH "You can have more fun with a running stream than with a pond," says the Imp. And that is because the galloping water, that leaps and runs over the pebbles, seems to do things to you all the time, while the water in a pond just stays still and lets you do things to it. A thousand games can be played with moving water; at every game it is as fresh as if no one had played with it before.