f symbolism as
majestic as it was age-old. Here in this little glass aquarium the
tadpole Guinevere had just freed her arms--she, with waving scarlet
fins, watching me with lidless white and staring eyes, still with
fish-like, fin-bound body. She danced upright, with new-born arms
folded across her breast, tail-tip flagellating frenziedly, stretching
long fingers with disks like cymbals, reaching out for the land she
had never trod, limbs flexed for leaps she had never made.

A few days before and Guinevere had been a fish, then a helpless
biped, and now suddenly, somewhere between my salad and coffee, she
became an aquatic quadruped. Strangest of all, her hands were mobile,
her feet useless; and when the dance was at an end, and she sank
slowly to the bottom, she came to rest on the very tips of her two
longest fingers; her legs and toes still drifting high and useless.
Just before she ceased, her arms stretched out right froggily, her
weird eyes rolled about, and she gulped a mighty gulp of the strange
thin medium that covered the surface of her liquid home.

At midnight of this same day only three things existed in the
world--on my table I turned from the _Bhagavad-Gita_ to Drinkwater's
_Reverie_ and back again; then I looked up to the jar of clear water
and watched Guinevere hovering motionless. At six the next morning she
was crouched safely on a bit of paper a foot from the aquarium. She
had missed the open window, the four-foot drop to the floor, and a
neighboring aquarium stocked with voracious fish: surely the gods of
pollywogs were kind to me. The great fins were gone--dissolved into
blobs of dull pink; the tail was a mere stub, the feet drawn close,
and a glance at her head showed that Guinevere had become a frog
almost within an hour. Three things I hastened to observe: the pupils
of her eyes were vertical, revealing her genus _Phyllomedusa_ (making
apt our choice of the feminine); by a gentle urging I saw that the
first and second toes were equal in length; and a glance at her little
humped back showed a scattering of white calcareous spots, giving the
clue to her specific personality--_bicolor_: thus were we introduced
to _Phyllomedusa bicolor_, alias Guinevere, and thus was established
beyond doubt her close relationship to Gawain.

During that first day, within three hours, during most of which I
watched her closely, Guinevere's change in color was beyond belief.
For an hour she leaped from time to ti