Your correspondent came to the southern waters at the second honk on Monday. The light was reaching the willows in the slow, deliberate way of the season’s middle weeks. The air carried that warm-stillness the older drakes, asked on the very point a fortnight back, declined to call anything grander than “the weather.” A fortnight on, it is still the weather.
The long-resident frog held his usual station, under the eastern fringe of the willow’s shadow. He had not moved much, so far as one could tell from a polite distance, since the hour before the reporter arrived, and showed no sign of meaning to. He marked the arrival in the way long readers of this gazette will know: an acknowledgement that registers a guest without inviting one in. Your correspondent paid the usual courtesy and kept back.
The frog presently resident in the southern waters was not about. This is the younger frog, whom the long-resident frog still declines to call an apprentice, and who is accordingly still named here by the formula the long-resident frog has allowed (see the sixteenth). Where he was is not to be said. At depth, at distance, or off at some station your correspondent has not learned to watch. He has lately, by all signs, grown harder to predict.
Now the pondweed. It has come up before, always inside a dispatch, never as the business of one. At the willow’s edge it is thicker than it stood at the same hour a fortnight ago. The thickening is no more than the season asks for. Pondweed thickens at this point of summer, and the older drakes file the thickening under matters settled and not worth a word. Your correspondent notes it for one reason only. By his own loose count the pondweed has now drawn two passing mentions in as many weeks. He would sooner it took its small place in the record on purpose. Better that than have some party decide it was let grow, by inattention, into a story it never was.
The candidate pads sat in their accustomed places relative to one another. These are the three the Cultural Subcommittee named on the third of May, none since adopted, on whose succession the Reed-Bed Subcommittee remains, by everything in the gazette’s records, formally unmoved. The fourth small pad was there too, at the southern edge of the cluster, drifting very slowly toward the eastern reeds. It has passed this way once before. It is not, as this paper has taken pains to make clear, one of the three provisional candidates. The frog paid it no mind. Neither did your correspondent.
Nothing further came of the hour. The frog blinked, once, slowly, in the way long acquaintance has taught your correspondent to read as the end of his patience for company that has not yet stated its business. The reporter has been dismissed by smaller gestures, and took this one in the spirit it was given.