tive caller has
wondered what use I intend to make of my little glass trough. The thing
creates a certain stir. Some insist that it is meant to hold my supplies
of oil and to take the place of the receptacle in general use in
our parts, the urn dug out of a block of stone. What would those
utilitarians have thought of my crazy mind, had they known that my
costly gear would merely serve to let me watch some wretched animals
kicking about in the water!

Smith and glazier are content with their work. I myself am pleased. For
all its rustic air, the apparatus does not lack elegance. It looks very
well, standing on a little table in front of a window visited by the
sun for the greater part of the day. Its holding capacity is some ten
or eleven gallons. What shall we call it? An aquarium? No, that would be
too pretentious and would, very unjustly, suggest the aquatic toy filled
with rock work, waterfalls and goldfish beloved of the dwellers in
suburbia. Let us preserve the gravity of serious things and not treat my
learned trough as though it were a drawing room futility. We will call
it the glass pond.

I furnish it with a heap of those limy incrustations wherewith certain
springs in the neighborhood cover the dead clump of rushes. It is light,
full of holes and gives a faint suggestion of a coral reef. Moreover,
it is covered with a short, green, velvety moss, a downy sward of
infinitesimal pond weed. I count on this modest vegetation to keep the
water in a reasonably wholesome state, without driving me to frequent
renewals which would disturb the work of my colonies. Sanitation and
quiet are the first conditions of success. Now the stocked pond will
not be long in filling itself with gases unfit to breathe, with putrid
effluvia and other animal refuse; it will become a sink in which life
will have killed life. Those dregs must disappear as soon as they are
formed, must be burnt and purified; and from their oxidized ruins there
must even rise a perfect life-giving gas, so that the water may retain
an unchangeable store of the breathable element. The plant effects this
purification in its sewage farm of green cells.

When the sun beats upon the glass pond, the work of the water weeds is
a sight to behold. The green-carpeted reef is lit up with an infinity
of scintillating points and assumes the appearance of a fairy lawn
of velvet, studded with thousands of diamond pin's heads. From this
exquisite jewelry pearls break loo