My Redfins were assuredly no common tadpoles, and an intolerant pollywog offers worthy research for the naturalist. Straining their medium of its opacity, I drew off the clayey liquid and replaced it with the clearer brown, wallaba-stained water of the Mazaruni; and thereafter all their doings, all their intimacies, were at my mercy. I felt as must have felt the first aviator who flew unheralded over an oriental city, with its patios and house-roofs spread naked beneath him.
It was on one of the early days of observation that an astounding thought came to me--before I had lost perspective in intensive watching, before familiarity had assuaged some of the marvel of these super-tadpoles. Most of those in my jar were of a like size, just short of an inch; but one was much larger, and correspondingly gorgeous in color and graceful in movement. As she swept slowly past my line of vision, she turned and looked, first at me, then up at the limits of her world, with a slow deliberateness and a hint of expression which struck deep into my memory. Green came to mind,--something clad in a smock of emerald, with a waist-coat of mother-of-pearl, and great sprawling arms,--and I found myself thinking of Gawain, our mystery frog of a year ago, who came without warning, and withheld all the secrets of his life. And I glanced again at this super-tad,--as unlike her ultimate development as the grub is unlike the beetle,--and one of us exclaimed, "It is the same, or nearly, but more delicate, more beautiful; it must be Guinevere." And so, probably for the first time in the world, there came to be a pet tadpole, one with an absurd name which will forever be more significant to us than the term applied by a forgotten herpetologist many years ago.
And Guinevere became known to all who had to do with the laboratory. Her health and daily development and color-change were things to be inquired after and discussed; one of us watched her closely and made notes of her life, one painted every radical development of color and pattern, another photographed her, and another brought her delectable scum. She was waited upon as sedulously as a termite queen. And she rewarded us by living, which was all we asked.
