"What are you thinking of?" said the husband. "They'll perish with cold. Sit on them at once!"
And she sat on them and covered them up and peeped at them every moment.
But he stayed up half the night, singing, on the top of the reed.
CHAPTER VI
Summer
The whole pond was alive.
There were not only great, horrid pikes and great mannerly carp and roach and perch and sticklebacks and eels. There were cray-fish and frogs and newts, pond-snails and fresh-water mussels, water-beetles and daddy-long-legs, whirligigs and ever so many others.
There was the duck, who quacked at her ducklings, and the swan, who glided over the water with bent neck and rustling wings, stately and elegant. There was the dragon-fly, who buzzed through the air, and there were the dragon-fly's young, who crawled upon the water-plants and ate till they burst. But that did not matter; they just had to burst, if they were to come to anything.