This is where you cry. For a time all went well. They dived, swam (back and front), trod water, returned to life when apparently drowned, and so forth. Then John pulled up the waste-pipe. He says now that he did it inadvertently, but I fancy that he wanted to see what would happen. What did happen was that they got into the whirlpool and disappeared. We turned on both the hot and cold taps to see if they would come back, but they didn't. Apparently you don't. We rushed into the garden to see if they would return by the drain-pipe with the rainwater, but not they. Only the paper bag was left to us ... and (to this day I cannot recall it without a tear) it was John who popped it. Charles, we never saw those newts again. Crusoe, Cleaver and Robinson were their names. Robinson and Crusoe they were to have been; and when the third came, and seemed to take a fancy to Robinson, we called him Cleaver. Where are they now? In the mighty Thames somewhere, I suppose. So, Charles, if ever you are near the river, keep a friendly eye open for them, will you? They may be a little wild now, but they were good newts in their day. We had a _Buforium_ too in our time, you must know. I have just made that word up, and it means a place where you keep toads. In our case it was the sink. The toad, as you may not have realised, has no vomerine or maxillary teeth, but he _has_ got a distinct tympanum. However, what I really wanted to say was that the toad has a pyriform tongue of incredible length, by means of which he catches his prey--thus differing from the frog, which leaps at 'em. We used to station a toad opposite one of the walls of the sink--of the _Buforium_--and then run his breakfast down the side. Sometimes it would be a very long centipede, and then you could have one toad for each end; or a---- What brutes little boys are; I'm not going to tell you any more about toads. (Except to say that his omosternum is generally missing. That must be very annoying.) Did I ever talk to you about hedgehogs? We kept no end of them, but Peter was the only one who stayed. He used to live in the scullery, so as to see that no black-beetles got about. One night the cook woke up suddenly and remembered that she had left the scullery tap running. So she jumped out of bed and ran downstairs, not even stopping to put on slippers.... She was a very heavy woman.... No, Peter wasn't hurt much; but she refused to have him in the kitchen again.