If you look closely among the water weeds in the transparent water at the pool margin you may see the demoiselle nymphs crawling about, breathing through feathers in their tails, and scooping up food with a big shovel which sticks out under their chins. They show little traces of their coming beauty. It is the awkward age of the demoiselle, and I fancy each is right glad to do up the hair, get into long black skirts with iridescent green bodices, and join the afternoon tea flitters. What the magic is in the brook, whereby these strange, awkward, crawling creatures, living beneath the water, some day crawl up the stem of a water weed, burst, stretch their wings and fly away the saintly and demure demoiselles of the pool, I do not know--whether it be distilled from the witch-hazel by the summer sun, or whether it slips more mysteriously from beneath the breast-plate of the spore of the polypody growing just above my head in the rock crevice. It must be the same magic whereby the many-legged, crawling helgramite worm, after living that sort of life sometimes for several years, one day crawls ashore, goes to sleep beneath a stone, and in another month wakes up and finds himself a _Corydalus cornutus_, a three-inch-long bug with extraordinary wings and great horns,--a bug that might well make one of those witches, met face to face on the moon’s disk, shriek and fall off her broomstick. If he can be that thing, changed from a helgramite worm, why can he not be a helgramite worm, changed from the water goblin which you can hear grumbling beneath the flat stone at the entrance to the pool beneath the witch-hazels? The answer is to be found neither in the rhyme of the poet nor in the reason of the scientific man. Musing on these things I suddenly sat up from my quiet seat beneath the rock ferns, for more magic yet was being displayed before my eyes. Over on the further side, in the shallow eddy, the pool was troubled a second, then there rose from it a wee sunfish, not more than three inches long, rose from it tail first and began balancing across the pool surface toward me, on his head. His tail quivered in the air, and I could see his freckles growing in the yellow transparency of his skin, yet, though I watched with wide eyes, he was two-thirds the way across the pool toward me before I noticed beneath him the tip of the nose and the wicked little dark eye of a water snake. At sight of him the demoiselles should have shrieked and flown away, but they made no move. I, however, indignant, arose, and seizing broken fragments of rock was about to lacerate him and loose his prey when I quite suddenly thought better of it. Had not I a few days before come down stream to the deep pool above and carried off a string of perch, sunfish, pouts, and an eel? Had not the water snake also a right to his dinner?