r bungalow, ten little jungle
friends came to live; and to us they will always be Kib and Gawain,
George and Gregory, Robert and Grandmother, Raoul and Pansy, Jennie
and Jellicoe.

Gawain was not a double personality--he was an intermittent
reincarnation, vibrating between the inorganic and the essence of
vitality. In a reasonable scheme of earthly things he filled the
niche of a giant green tree-frog, and one of us seemed to remember
that the Knight Gawain was enamored of green, and so we dubbed him.
For the hours of daylight Gawain preferred the role of a hunched-up
pebble of malachite; or if he could find a leaf, he drew eighteen
purple vacuum toes beneath him, veiled his eyes with opalescent lids,
and slipped from the mineral to the vegetable kingdom, flattened by
masterly shading which filled the hollows and leveled the bumps; and
the leaf became more of a leaf than it had been before Gawain was
merged with it.

Night, or hunger, or the merciless tearing of sleep from his soul
wrought magic and transformed him into a glowing, jeweled specter. He
sprouted toes and long legs; he rose and inflated his sleek emerald
frog-form; his sides blazed forth a mother-of-pearl waist-coat--a
myriad mosaics of pink and blue and salmon and mauve; and from nowhere
if not from the very depths of his throat, there slowly rose twin
globes,--great eyes,--which stood above the flatness of his head, as
mosques above an oriental city. Gone were the neutralizing lids, and
in their place, strange upright pupils surrounded with vermilion lines
and curves and dots, like characters of ancient illuminated Persian
script. And with these appalling eyes Gawain looked at us, with these
unreal, crimson-flecked globes staring absurdly from an expressionless
emerald mask, he contemplated roaches and small grasshoppers, and
correctly estimated their distance and activity. We never thought of
demanding friendship, or a hint of his voice, or common froggish
activities from Gawain. We were content to visit him now and then, to
arouse him, and then leave him to disincarnate his vertebral outward
phase into chlorophyll or lifeless stone. To muse upon his courtship
or emotions was impossible. His life had a feeling of sphinx-like
duration--Gawain as a tadpole was unthinkable. He seemed ageless,
unreal, wonderfully beautiful, and wholly inexplicable.

II

A JUNGLE CLEARING

Within six degrees of the Equator, shut in by jungle, on a cloudless
da