It was a sunny day, and I, Jenny the Frog, was casting around the old garden in search of a dab of adventure. I live in a large round flowerpot, just outside the green gate at the end of the old garden. The winding path leads from it to the sunny Old Place, where there are lots of rooms and many windows, and curtains of embroidered muslin aerially waving on the upper landings. In a word, it is the best place possible to live in if you are a frog.
When I peeped over the edge of my pot, never once did I imagine all the wonders life still had in store for me. Far down the garden, hidden by the dark Green Heather bushes, I saw a curious light flickering. So I stretched my supple legs, and off I went.
“What a funny frog!” just thought I heard someone whisper. I did not think it worth while to turn round, but went on hopping down the garden.
Suddenly I came to a halt. On the very spot where the curious light had been flitting, there stood a puddle, the likes of which I had never seen before. It was of the rarest blue sapphire, interspersed with pretty flecks of gold, whilst the solitary willow-tree growing by the side threw down its long black hair in brown rings under the surface. It was just the place where men say that “mermaids” live and enjoy their little tea-parties.
Being possessed of great imagination, I peeped anxiously into the puddle. I had not been mistaken: there really was a tea-party. All kinds of magical insects were running about on its surface, some of them whirring noisily, others, on the contrary, looking as if they were fast asleep. If the truth be known, it was the very place to learn to fly.
I peeped in and listened. The most charming music came from a buzzing beetle, whose glassy wings sparkled like glittering rainbows. The others kept time to his cadence by twitching antennas. The frog in its pride struck up a waltz, but because there was no room on the surface of the water, all the insects jumped over one another’s heads or flew round and round in the air.
“I wish I were a butterfly,” drowsily murmured one little calf, which had fallen asleep on his long antennae. But just as it had fixed all its hopes on the “golden gauze” becoming a butterfly, a “garden-fly” pounced on it, and from that very moment a black tragedy was being performed on the operatic stage of the puddle.
This was altogether too horrible. I must jump in and prevent bulgarity, I mean brutality, in the “transported” presentation of real nature. But just as I was on the point of jumping in, I heard a rustling and cracking behind me, and saw Papa, a curious-looking puppy, creeping timidly from shrub to shrub until he got to the edge of the Blue Puddle.
How odd, I thought. Here at least I occupy myself with only my own little affairs. That I had indeed done well to come down here!
At last, just as I was congratulating myself on the perfect prudence of putting into execution all kinds of brave things to keep the first service at the puddle up to the proper idea of humanity, I heard Papa cry, “O water! water! muck, muck water here!” and tumbler-like he drank up all the bravura-measures of the tea-party.
Sad was the rage of the damaged butterflies and angry insects: everybody fought with everybody, and like the ghosts in the upper world called to one another for help, so did they cry, “Rain! rain! a storm!” All of a sudden it really did pour down from the heavens, and I took care to get back to my large round flowerpot.
So long as the rain lasted, one was quite alone up there. But as soon as the sun was once more boiling away, and the heaps of damp mists rolled away in golden wreaths, there was the whole crowd of insects, with their innumerable grievances, about me again.
In the moonlight, however, my blue puddle looked quite other than down there below. Of the innumerable patterned starry heavens, Nature, the great artist and wood-engraver, cut up the most beautiful spaces and brought them exactly upside down on the blue puddle. It might be a curious idea to make rain with their help of the ivy leaves over our heads, but to do this the web of the stars must be perfect.
Then came a procession of burnt brown and dark blue ants which marched steadily over my flowerpot to the edge of my blue puddle, where they pitched down some small pieces of burnt gingerbread. They then scratched and worked, scratched and worked, the rose-buds were smashed, the gems tossed: “Sustain our iron shield with a leather apron,” they called out from time to time. Then they pointed with feelings of enchantment to a spark of fixed electricity, which they had got out of one of the raindrops.
“Now take care,” whispered I to the invisible spirits of the fairy mermaids dancing, no doubt, beneath the surface which swifted themselves about in a manner that would have brought down a developed Angel to the ground. “Take care; do mind doling out some grains of the finest Light for your topsy-turvy down here.”
In the midst of all this I happened to hear, just behind my shoulder, loud squeaking; and turning round I saw cousins from a neighbouring distance, which one only saw four days in every year. Strange, odorous, shabby fellows were they: they had bad manners in my presence, putting their snouts under their arms whenever they spoke instead of holding friends’ hands.
Having by instinct the right to mix in whatever company we like, the cousins from the neighbouring distance gastronomically examined nature with their long, thin, forked tongues. After about two hours, I could no longer hear about my blue puddle anything but “Muck, muck, water here!” “Do not come too near,” with all the secret finesse of trained frogs from the region of the Rhine. “Over there lies the Spaniard.” “That is no one,” said I; and when they, with good reason, had called attention to the precautionary measure of opening a small island in their noses, naturally they climbed in at the door next me.
And here, all at once, I found by sad experience that it was beginning to shower again. I waited until the rain all of a sudden stopped without taking a white feather. But as to whether that had to do with it being Friday evening, I do not know. It was, however, a Friday regularly laid out, and I actually hold it yearly in my large round flowerpot. You might call it my “autochthonic emancipation-day,” for whilst I am scrubbing properly within, the little ones come out and jump into the field in all directions, in order to lie, brazenheaded, on the banks of the Blue puddle before the invisible spirits of the water-maidens. But now came the story related about the sun drying things and the Uncle of my cousins from the neighbouring distance, quite unbounded. For hours and hours there was a separate hot rain, even for well-baked frogs; so we had to come out—a long procession, of course, going down in a row.
Just opposite my fast-greying flowerpot, out came in a hullabaloo a sea of living water, whose watery waves turned everything upside down, not omitting my large round flowerpot. There was nothing for it but to stop quiet outside, that I might not fall in, crushed amidst the others, out into the wide impassable sea.
But hardly had my anger been vented, scarcely the time spent in pouting my frog mouth to a third rcoco, than a large milk-white sail mitigated all my grievances. Pails of me stood sprinkled and flying high above each other. A nightly rainbow touched with brilliant colours the tops of the saying world in the interminable moist field. The moon hid herself behind tulle-like clouds, quite exhausted after her hard work the preceding day, and the clear thick dewdrops like lighted Christmas candlesticks set on the turrets of pitch-dark fir-trees, as well as on the roofs of an infinitude of houses with great sharp gables cut in oblique points.
“Suffer it to go on raining,” shouted I, “and I will also suffer the secret of mankind? But you will never make the Blue puddle again!”