One day in the heat of the summer Latona came to the country of Lycia in Greece and it really seemed as if she could not walk a single step farther. The babies were heavy and she had found no water for refreshing herself for a long time. By chance, though, she saw a pool of clear water just beyond in the hollow of a valley. Some of the country people of Lycia were there on the edge of the water gathering reeds and fine willows with which they were weaving baskets for holding fruits. Latona summoned all her strength and dragged herself to the pool, kneeling down on the bank to drink and dip up water for cooling the babies' heads. "Stop!" the rustic people commanded her. "You have no right to touch our waters!" "I only wish to drink, kind friends," Latona explained to them. "I thought that water was free to all, and my mouth is so dry that I can hardly speak. A drink of water would be nectar to me. The gods give us as common property the sunshine, the air, and the streams and I would only share your pool to revive me, not to bathe in it. See how my babies, too, stretch out their arms to you in pleading!" It was quite true; Latona's little ones were holding out their arms in supplication, but the rustics turned their heads away. They did more than this. They waded into the pool and stirred up the water with their feet so as to make it muddy and unfit to drink. As they did this they laughed at Latona's discomfiture and jeered at her sorry plight. She was a long suffering mother, but she felt as if this unkindness was more than she could bear. She lifted her hands toward the habitation of the gods and called to them for help. "May these rustics who refuse to succor two children of your family be punished!" Latona begged. "May they never be able to leave this pool whose clear waters they have defiled!" The company of the gods, and perhaps Juno also, heard Latona's entreaty and one of the strangest things of all mythology happened. The rustics tried to leave the pool and return to their basket-making, but they discovered that their feet had suddenly grown flat and shapeless and were stuck fast in the mud. They called for help, but their voices were harsh, their throats bloated, and their mouths had stretched so that they were unable to form words. Their necks had disappeared and their heads, with great bulging eyes, were joined to their backs. Their flesh was turned to thick green skin and they could not stand erect. It was as Latona had asked. These boorish, unseeing country clowns would never leave the slimy water into which they had stepped, for the gods had changed them into the first frogs.