reed-warbler.

"Oh," answered his wife, "it's a protegee of mine! A little May-fly
grub. I promised that I wouldn't eat her. She is so happy at the thought
of being grown-up ... and that only for a couple of hours, poor little
thing!"

She said nothing about her intention of eating the grub when she was
grown up; and the reed-warbler was seriously angry.

"What sentimental gammon!" he said. "It's unseemly for a woman with five
children to commit such follies."

"I thought it so poetic to give her leave to live," said she.

"Fiddlesticks!" said her husband. "Poetry doesn't apply to one's food.
If it did, we should all die of hunger. Besides you can't take a
creature like that into consideration."

Thereupon he ran down the reed and hunted eagerly for the grub, to eat
her.

But she heard what he said and had gone down to the bottom with terror
in her little heart.

CHAPTER VII

The Carp

[Illustration]

The summer wore on and things grew worse and worse.

No end of young had come out of the eggs and they filled the whole pond.
Out in the middle it was quite green with millions of little
water-weeds, which died and rotted and reeked till seven big perch died
of it and floated on their backs.

"The pond's blossoming!" sneered the rushes.

"There's a horrid smell here," said Mrs. Reed-Warbler.

"I think, considering all things, that it's delightful here," said the
carp.

The carp swam a little way in among the reeds. He had made a friend
there, in the shape of the fresh-water mussel, who waded ever so slowly
through the mud, or else settled on the bottom and yawned.

They suited each other, these two, for they were quiet and sedate
people, who led the same sort of life.

"I don't care to go hunting wildly for food," said the carp. "I open my
mouth where the water is moderately thick and let whatever there is run
in. Something always sticks. Then one needn't kill people and one
doesn't see all that misery."

"It's just so with us," said the fresh-water mussel. "I employ exactly
the same methods. It's more gentlemanly and I have grown stout on it."

Then the two sat and talked and yawned all the time and amused
themselves capitally notwithstanding.

"Mind you don't go too near them," said Mrs. Reed-Warbler to the May-fly
grub.

"Yes, I will; thanks very much," said the grub.

"The carp and the mussel are nicer than the others, I think," said Mrs.
Reed-Warbler to her husband.

"Really?