The long-resident frog of the southern waters held his annual midsummer gathering on Saturday evening, in the form he had committed to on the eleventh of last month: modest, no programme, no Subcommittee oversight. It fell a week after the cultural programme beneath the Old Willow, which the gathering has, by long habit, declined to share a date with. Whether the separation is by design or by the plain operation of the frog’s preferred evening, he has given no sign across many seasons, and has not been pressed for one.
The correspondent took a station at the western edge of the southern waters at about the sixth honk. The terms were settled in advance. The gathering’s privacy was to be respected in the matter of distance, in the matter of how long the station was kept, and in the matter of which questions might be put. The station was held something over two hours. What follows is what those terms allowed to be reported.
The gathering convened on a small pad in the southern reaches of the cluster. For the record, this pad is not one of the three provisional candidates named by the Cultural Subcommittee on the third of last month, and it has gone unmentioned in these pages all season. On Saturday it held the long-resident frog, in the central position, which he took at the opening and kept throughout. It held two further frogs of no acquaintance. And at a respectful interval, on a small adjacent leaf, it held the second frog of Monday morning, whose continued presence in the southern waters the correspondent had watched through the week between. The travelling drake, lately back from the upper bend, was on the water at a remove from the pad judged the proper one for a non-frog at a gathering of frogs.
The proceedings ran as the frog had said they would. No programme was advertised, and none was observed. The long-resident frog opened with one short croak, which the correspondent recorded and does not feel competent to interpret. The others made contributions of their own at intervals. The two unfamiliar frogs each spoke once, in turn. The second frog of Monday morning did not, in the period observed, speak at all. The travelling drake produced what looked, once, like an acknowledgement, when the long-resident frog inclined his head briefly toward him. Taken together the contributions filled about half an hour. Through all of it there was the quality of unhurry this paper has come to expect of the long-resident frog’s appointments, and nothing in the half-hour gave the correspondent cause to revise the expectation.
The matter of the central position was not, so far as the correspondent could tell from the station, formally raised. That matter carries some weight: the vacancy of the seventeenth of April, the frog’s known reluctance to be hurried on the question of a successor, the Travelling Drake’s proposal of the eighteenth of last month, and the deferral of that proposal pending jurisdictional clarification. Whether it was raised informally, in the contributions the correspondent could not interpret at that distance, will not, on this evidence, be guessed.
The gathering closed at the late twilight. It was, worth noting in passing, the same hour at which the cultural programme had closed beneath the Old Willow a week before. The long-resident frog submerged. The two unfamiliar frogs left, separately, by routes this paper will not record. The travelling drake withdrew toward the eastern reaches. The second frog of Monday morning stayed some minutes on the adjacent leaf. Then he too withdrew, by a route that carried him toward the long-resident frog’s customary station, and by the time the correspondent took his leave he was no longer in view.
The pad of the gathering was restored to its former vacancy. The candidate pads stood in their relative positions. The central position was open, as it has been open since the seventeenth of April. The southern waters at the late twilight on Saturday held all of it in a stillness with the character of a thing conducted, weighed, and set down.