The long-resident frog of the southern waters has turned up in these pages often enough lately to warrant an introduction in his own right. He consented to one on Wednesday morning, granting a brief audience at his customary station beneath the willows. Brief was the agreement: a quarter of an hour, no more. It ran to nearly two. Once approached, the frog proved a good deal more disposed to conversation than the long, spare record of his contributions had led this correspondent to expect.
The frog declines to be named in print, and is referred to here only by his function and his tenure. The tenure is long. How long, neither this paper nor, it turns out, the frog can establish with any precision. “I arrived,” he said, with a deliberation this correspondent took for habit rather than reluctance, “before the great willow had finished growing. I cannot now say how much before. The willow has been a long time at it.” Whether he had come to the southern waters by his own decision or in some other way, he would not specify. “There are some matters,” he observed, “of which one no longer recalls the prologue.”
His tenure has set him at the edge of most of the pond’s longer concerns. The Great Heel Shortage of the late frost was, he confirmed, the worst he can recall. The southern waters felt it no less than the rest of the pond, though, he added without rancour, they were less reported. The redrawing of the east channel three winters past he had watched with what he called “philosophical interest.” He had watched the Wardens, too. The present one is, by the frog’s count, the fourth, though the Warden himself will own only to “several.” Each succession the frog had observed with the equanimity of a long resident toward every matter of office. He declined to say whether the present incumbent had improved on those before.
On the central lily pad, whose obituary this paper carried two Fridays past, and to which the frog has since added an affectionate supplement, he spoke at greater length than on anything else. The pad had been, for as long as he could recall, “the place at which one knew where one was.” Its absence was felt. Its successor, should one ever come, would be felt differently. He did not seem to consider this a matter for grief, nor, properly, for celebration. Only for noting. He had now noted it.
By way of a closing question, the frog was asked his view on the object that had taken up the pond’s week. He reminded this correspondent that he had offered a position on Tuesday. He was content to let that position stand, and to add nothing to a matter which had, in his assessment, already drawn such comment as it warranted. This correspondent agreed. The frog indicated by a short gesture that the audience was over, and withdrew with a dignity this correspondent would not, at the outset, have predicted.
The frog will, this paper expects, go on favouring the southern waters with his presence, and this paper will go on extending him such hospitality as the pages allow. This correspondent took her leave with more personal feeling than she had thought an interview, obtained in the first place with such reluctance, would leave her. “It was,” the frog had said of the vacant pad, near the end, “the place at which one knew where one was.”