A high bank, set with briars, screened it from the wind, and it had a slimy, shiny green covering, in which the breeze tore a hole once in twelve months. In the pond there dwelt (according to the order of nature) a colony of quite small worms which fed on still smaller ones.
The pond was neither long nor wide, not even deep, and if the little worms could neither discover a bottom nor swim to shore, they had only the thick slime and the water-weeds and the fallen twigs to thank for it.
The geography of the pond was in its infancy.
Conceit, on the other hand, flourished, and fancy had it all her own way beneath the green covering—and the two together sat spinning and weaving.
And they wove between them a legend of the beginning of things, a truly worm-like tradition.
The pond is the great sea, and the four streams of Paradise flow into it. Hiddekel brings gold (that is the slime in which they find their nourishment), and the other three bring flowers (the water-weeds among which they play hide-and-seek on holidays), pearls (frog-pawn), and corals (the little orange fungi on the rotting twigs).
The green cover, the slimy cap on the surface of the pond, is the heaven stretched out over the ocean, a special heaven for their own particular world. Fragments of egg-shell, which have fallen into it, play the part of stars, and a rotten pumpkin does duty for the sun.
The chance stones flung into the pond by the herd-boys are, of course, hailstones flung by heaven at the head of sinners!
And when their heaven opened, and a few beams of the real sun penetrated to a wormy brain, then they believed in hell!
But life in the pond was a pleasant thing!