bottom spinning, or on his back. He was lucky to reach it
at all. Sometimes a sunbeam's dazzling radiance would check him in
mid-career, and his callow eyes would take an hour to recover. It was a
month before his eyelids developed. Sometimes he would collide with others
of his own kind, equally unskilled in steering, and sometimes a vague
quiver in the water caused him instinctively to mimic death, and thus
avoid death in reality.

In a week's time he had grown out of all knowledge. To be accurate, he had
doubled in size. But, even then, it was only the copper gleam of his eyes
that saved him from utter insignificance. The remainder of him, for the
most part of jelly transparency, was invisible against his sombre
surroundings. His sucker had taken the semblance of a mouth, his gills
were longer and more feathery, the curves of his tail were more shapely,
but still he was, as yet, the merest apology for a tadpole, and so he
remained until his limbs grew. They came in front at first--froggy's come
behind, he wants them to swim with--the most curious spindle-shanks of
arms that can be imagined, with elbows always flexed, and fingers always
stretched apart. In due course his legs followed, of like purpose and
absurdity. For swimming he only used his tail, but for balancing and
steering, his feet and hands. Would he rise to the surface, he must flick
his tail, and turn his toes and fingers upwards. Would he seek the bottom,
he must depress them. Would he lie motionless, suspended in mid-water, he
must point them straight outwards from his sides.

[Illustration: HIS SUCKER HAD TAKEN THE SEMBLANCE OF A MOUTH.]

[Illustration: HIS GILLS WERE LONGER AND MORE FEATHERY.]

It was the charm of a free-swimming existence that divorced him from a
vegetarian diet. To be continually sucking in plant sludge was a low
grubby business at the best. Besides, he was now furnished with a
respectable pair of jaws, not to mention the rudiments of teeth. Daphne
was his first victim. Daphne sounds somehow floral, but this Daphne was
equipped with one eye and several pairs of legs, and practised abrupt
jumpy flights through the water. In short, she was a branchiopod, to
be vulgarly precise, a water-flea. The succulence of Daphne led to
experiments on Cyclops--Cyclops is her first cousin--and the taste,
once acquired, never left him.

It was in the pursuit of this latter that he lost a leg, and thus realized
that the problems of existence before