"Indeed, you do your friends an injustice," said the reed-warbler. "For, only a moment ago, with my own eyes I saw how the stickleback built a nest down there for his children."
"The stickleback!" said the eel, with a sneer. "I can't stand sticklebacks: they prick me so horribly in the neck. But that has nothing to do with the case. What is a stickleback, I ask you? I remember once when I was caught and about to be skinned. I was very small at the time and the cook, who was going to put a knife into me, said 'No bigger than a stickleback'!"
"Were you caught? Were you about to be skinned?" asked the reed-warbler. "How on earth did you escape?"
"I slipped away from the cook," replied the eel. "Thanks to my slipperiness, which your good lady disliked. Then I got into the sink ... out through the gutter, the gutter-pipe, the ditch and so on. One has to wriggle and twist."
"You may well say that!" said the reed-warbler.
"One goes through a bit of everything, you see," said the eel. "But to return to what we were saying, take us eels, for instance. We fling our young into the sea and, for the rest, leave them to their own resources. Like men of the world that we are, we know what life is worth and therefore we fling them out wholesale, by the million, as I said just now: I beg pardon, by the half-million; I don't want to offend your love of accuracy. In this way, the children learn to shift for themselves at once. I was brought up in this way myself and learnt to wriggle and twist."
"I can't understand it," said Mrs. Reed-Warbler.
"Very sorry," said the eel. "Perhaps my conversation is rather too much for a lady who is sitting on her eggs."
"I think children are the sweetest things in the world," she said. "One can't help being fond of them, whether they're one's own or another's."