ere?"

"Pulling them off the trees. Where do you think she gets them?" she
demanded.

A large mosquito broke through her guard at that moment and she flung
the torch angrily at the fire.

"I'm eaten alive!" she snapped. "I wish to Heaven I had smallpox or
something they could all take and go away and die."

The frogs' legs were heavenly, although in a restaurant I loathe the
things. I left Aggie wondering if her hay fever wasn't contagious
through the blood and hoping the mosquitoes would get it and sneeze
themselves to death, and went to find Tish.

She was standing in the margin of the lake up to her knees in water,
with a blazing torch in one hand and one of our tent poles in the other.
Tied to the end the pole was a grapevine line, and a fishing-hook made
of a hairpin was attached to it.

Her method, which it seems she'd heard from Charlie Sands and which was
not in the "Young Woodsman," was simple and effectual.

"Don't move," she said tensely when she heard me on the bank. "There's
one here as big as a chicken!"

She struck the flare forward, and I could see the frog looking at it and
not blinking. He sat in a sort of heavenly ecstasy, like a dog about to
bay at the moon, while the hook dangled just at his throat.

"I'm half-ashamed to do it, Lizzie, it's so easy," she said calmly,
still tickling the thing's throat with the hook. "Grab him as I throw
him at you. They slip off sometimes."

The next instant she jerked the hook up and caught the creature by the
lower jaw. It was the neatest thing I have ever seen. Tish came wading
over to where I stood and examined the frog.

"If we only had some Tartare sauce!" she said regretfully. "I wish you'd
look at my ankle, Lizzie. There's something stuck to it."

The something was a leech. It refused to come off, and so she carried
both frog and leech back to the camp. Aggie said on no account to pull a
leech off, it left its teeth in and the teeth went on burrowing, or laid
eggs or something. One must leave it on until it was full and round and
couldn't hold any more, and then it dropped off.

So all night Tish kept getting up and going to the fire to see if it was
swelling. But toward morning she fell asleep and it dropped off, and we
had a terrible feeling that it was somewhere in our blankets.

But the leech caused less excitement that evening than my story of Percy
and the little girl in the white coat. Aggie was entranced, and Tish had
made Percy a sui