inen two frogs were sitting. Their bright eyes absolutely
gleamed with pleasure.

"Wonderful weather this!" one of them cried. "How refreshing! And the
linen keeps the water together so beautifully. My hind legs seem to
quiver as if I were going to swim."

"I should like to know," said the second, "if the swallow, who flies
so far round, in her many journeys in foreign lands ever meets with a
better climate than this. What delicious dampness! It is really as if
one were lying in a wet ditch. Whoever does not rejoice in this,
certainly does not love his fatherland."

"Have you been in the emperor's stable?" asked the beetle: "there the
dampness is warm and refreshing. That's the climate for me; but I
cannot take it with me on my journey. Is there never a muck-heap, here
in the garden, where a person of rank, like myself, can feel himself
at home, and take up his quarters?"

But the frogs either did not or would not understand him.

"I never ask a question twice!" said the beetle, after he had already
asked this one three times without receiving any answer.

Then he went a little farther, and stumbled against a fragment of
pottery, that certainly ought not to have been lying there; but as it
was once there, it gave a good shelter against wind and weather. Here
dwelt several families of earwigs; and these did not require much,
only sociality. The female members of the community were full of the
purest maternal affection, and accordingly each one considered her own
child the most beautiful and cleverest of all.

"Our son has engaged himself," said one mother. "Dear, innocent boy!
His greatest hope is that he may creep one day into a clergyman's ear.
It's very artless and loveable, that; and being engaged will keep him
steady. What joy for a mother!"

"Our son," said another mother, "had scarcely crept out of the egg,
when he was already off on his travels. He's all life and spirits;
he'll run his horns off! What joy that is for a mother! Is it not so,
Mr. Beetle?" for she knew the stranger by his horny coat.

"You are both quite right," said he; so they begged him to walk in;
that is to say, to come as far as he could under the bit of pottery.

"Now, you also see _my_ little earwig," observed a third mother and a
fourth; "they are lovely little things, and highly amusing. They are
never ill-behaved, except when they are uncomfortable in their inside;
but, unfortunately, one is very subject to that at their age."