On a corner of my desk there stands a china shell; its flat and oval basin is about as broad as the palm of my hand; it is a spotted brownish-yellow on the outside, and a purply-pinkish white on the inside; and on the crinkled edge of one end there sits a green frog with his china mouth wide open, thus revealing the ruddy hollow of his interior. At the opposite end of the shell there is a page of china music, purporting to be the first four bars of a song by Schubert. Time was when the frog held in his long greenish-yellow arms a still longer trombone made of bright brass wire, bent into shape, and tipped with a flaring disk of gilded porcelain. In the days when the china frog was young he pretended to be playing on the brass trombone. Despite its musical assertiveness, the function of the frog that played the trombone was humble enough: the shell was designed to serve as a receiver for the ashes of cigars and cigarettes. But it is a score of years at least since the china frog has held the brass trombone to its open lips. Only a few months after he gave his first mute concert on the corner of my table the carelessness of a chance visitor toppled him over on the floor, and broke off both his arms and so bent the trombone that even the barren pretense of his solo became an impossibility. A week or two later the battered musical instrument disappeared; and ever since then the gaping mouth of the frog has seemed to suggest that he was trying to sing Schubert's song. His open countenance, I am sorry to say, has often tempted my friends to make sport of him. They have filled the red emptiness of his body with the gray ashes of their cigars; they have even gone so far as to put the stump of a half-smoked cigarette between his lips, as though he were solacing himself thus for the loss of his voice. Although the frog is no longer playing an inaudible tune on an immovable instrument, I keep it on a corner of my desk, where it has been for nearly twenty years. Sometimes of a winter's night, when I take my seat at the desk before the crackling and cheerful hickory fire, the frog that played the trombone catches my eye, and I go back in memory to the evening when it performed its first solo in my presence, and I see again the beautiful liquid eyes of the friend who brought it to me. We were very young then, both of us, that night before Christmas, and our hearts kept time with the lilt of the tune that the frog played silently on his trombone. Now I am young no longer, I am even getting old, and my friend has been dead this many a year. Sometimes, as I look at the gaping frog, I know that if I could hear the song he is trying to sing I should hate it for the memories it would recall.