The afternoon dreams down from its pinnacle of hazy heat to the soft level of eventide. Under the pines of the west side of the cove the level sun slips in and seems to caress the green trunks, and the tops above sing a little sighing song of contentment. Strange you have not heard this before, for the wind has been there all the afternoon. But it is toward nightfall that the cove wakes up and you hear many lisping elfin sounds that you have never noticed during the mid-afternoon heat. You hear the sedges talking in the undulations now. You did not hear them before, yet the undulations have been gliding dreamily among the sedges all day. The pasture birds are waking up their preludes of evensong, and the sun across the cove to the west is glorifying all the quivering canopy of green leaves through which it shines with a luminous, diaphanous quality which makes magic all along that side of the cove. You are on the borderland between the clear definition of reality and the mystic haze of nightfall. To the west, looking away from the glow, all is gently but clearly defined; to the east, looking into the golden rose of the sunset through the shimmering illusion of leaves, lies the pathway to the land that the king’s son saw in the Arabian Night’s tale. The nightly entertainment, the evening minstrel show, is about to begin in the cove, an entertainment in which the frogs are the minstrels, an all star performance, for every one of them is capable of being an end man or interlocutor or soloist as the case may require.