I found the long-resident frog of the southern waters at the second willow on Thursday morning, in the customary spot he keeps under it. He was back from the spell of travel at the upper bend, whose particulars have, more than once lately, been kept out of these columns on purpose. He had come by an hour and a route no one had told me, and which I had not pressed to learn. He had settled again at the eastern fringe of the willow’s shadow. On the visible evidence he was well. He marked my arrival with a movement of the head that I take, on the long acquaintance between the frog and this paper, to be his now established way of saying hello.
The frog presently resident in the southern waters was at a station a short way off from the senior party’s, in what I would call an attentive posture. The long-resident frog still declines to fix him with any word this paper has been free to set down, so the form he has himself allowed is the one that stands. The younger frog did not speak. He has not, in all the time these pages have kept him, spoken once. His being there seemed to be the whole of what he brought to the morning, and I took my cue from the senior party’s plain ease with the arrangement and let the younger frog be.
I reached my usual spot, let the customary interval pass before asking anything, and put to the long-resident frog the matter of the upper bend. He took the question without surprise. After a pause I put at about four breaths, he answered in three sentences, which I give here as near to his words as the moment let me.
I am not, on the present occasion, at liberty to discuss what I saw.
I am not, at my age and in such time as is left to me for the business of the southern waters, minded to be drawn into speculation about lights.
The upper bend has, this paper may take it from me, a longer memory than the sluice. And the sluice’s memory is considerable.
He finished. He went under. The water at the willow’s edge closed over the spot he had held with the smallest stir my eye could catch. The pondweed nearby was not, all the while I watched, disturbed.
I waited, in case he should come up again to add to it. He did not. The frog presently resident in the southern waters stayed at his station and gave no sign, by anything I could see, of holding the reply complete or wanting. The arrangement at the willow looked settled.
Having the reply, I left it there. Over the seasons the frog has favoured me with his notice I have come to know the shape in which he declines to be drawn, and this was that shape, and the answer was the answer the matter was going to get. What the lights at the upper bend are, the gazette still cannot say, and the records leave the question standing. What the frog saw there is, on the frog’s own wish, not to be carried past what the frog has offered of it.
Filed at midday. The southern waters, all the while I watched, were exceptionally still.