The young frog of the southern waters has a settled name at last, or at least a settled form of words. He was first reported here on the morning of the twenty-second of last month, as “a smaller frog of no particular acquaintance” in the company of the long-resident frog. The matter reached its resolution on Thursday. It came at the long-resident frog’s own pace and on his own terms, which is the only pace and the only terms on which anything has ever come from that quarter.
The reporter had spent part of each of the last several afternoons at the willow’s edge, in the hope that the long-resident frog might, when he chose, take up the standing inquiry put to him three times before. Each of those times the inquiry met the courteous silence that has come to read as the frog’s preferred form of acknowledgement. Thursday afternoon was different. The long-resident frog surfaced late in the day, rather closer to the bank than is his habit, and signalled by a small movement of the head that the reporter might approach if he wished. The reporter approached, at the modest pace such an invitation calls for.
The conversation was brief, and conducted with the precision of one who had given the matter as much thought as he had decided it wanted. The smaller frog seen in his company at intervals these past weeks was, in his words, “a frog presently resident in the southern waters,” taken down as given. How long he had been so resident the long-resident frog declined to fix any more closely than “some weeks now, and the season suiting him,” and there he let it stand. He did not give the smaller frog’s name. The reporter did not press it. The long-resident frog’s own name has never, to this day, appeared in print here.
Then came a closing question. Might the smaller frog, in future, be referred to by a designation that acknowledged the apparent character of his presence at the willow’s edge, the reporter ventured, something along the lines of an apprenticeship. The long-resident frog paused for what the reporter measured at three breaths. He was not minded to use that word, he said, and the formulation he had already supplied would be found “sufficient to the requirements.” The reporter took the answer in the spirit it was given and let the matter rest there.
So the form of words is settled. The young frog seen in the southern waters since the morning after the midsummer programme is, henceforth in these pages, “the frog presently resident in the southern waters,” and the gazette adopts it gladly. It is the long-resident frog’s own designation, accepted on his authority, with the gratitude due any form of words arrived at by so patient a negotiation. He has, in earlier reports, been called the second frog. Those reports were not in error. They were the best to be had at the time.
The frog presently resident in the southern waters was, when the reporter left, at a small remove from the long-resident frog, in his now-settled attitude of attentive watching. The long-resident frog gave a short gesture to mark the audience concluded, and went under. “Sufficient to the requirements,” the gazette will write from here on, and the frog, who chose the words, may keep his name.