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88 looking into the matter, I find I am borne out by Sir Thomas Browne, who says, “whereto [that is leaping] it is very well conformed, for therein the [grasshopper] the legs behind are longer than all the body, and make at the second joint acute angles at a considerable advancement above their bodies.” Do not the French call the grasshopper sauterelle? A poor beetle with the shoulders of Atlas and the thighs of Hercules, which in dryer weather drove headlong through the solid earth, heaving great pebbles up as Enceladus heaves Etna, was sprawling helpless as a moth upon the water. We rescued Goliath and went on. A frog, great with rain-water and inordinately puffed up, sat pudgily on a stump. It narrowly escaped with life, for the sight of it enwrathed us. Had the floods then (a nation’s history closing in a sudden stroke of picturesque fate) tragically closed an era, that a spotted frog might go comfortably? The Empire of Assyria expiring with the flames of Sardanapalus’s pyre — Babylon poured out under the feet of the Mede with the wine along Belshazzar’s palace floor — the Icthyophagi succumbing to the united wrath of a continent’s mightiest rivers, and gone to feed the fish they fed on! All this that a gape-mouthed batrachian might give itself complacent airs! The earth submerged, the Caucasian a failure, and a frog happy! A deluge, whirling men and their houses away to the sea, to be a holiday and a Golden Age for a gross amphibian! The idea incensed us, and the frog was in a parlous state. But it escaped.

Meanwhile the sun is setting, and we turn homewards — home in the dusk. The terns are all gone, but in their place the flying-foxes flap heavily along the water, and the owls hail us from all the shadows. How