They turned homeward, and Noémi ran on, calling from afar to Therese, "Mother, mother, see what we have caught! a beautiful bird."
Mamma Therese prepared to scold her daughter severely.
"Don't you know that it is forbidden to catch birds?"
"But such a bird! Herr Timar caught it, and gave it to me. Just peep into my hand."
Frau Therese threw up her hands when she saw the green tree-frog there.
"Look how it blinks at me with its beautiful eyes!" cried Noémi, beaming with delight. "We are going to put him in a glass, catch flies for him, and he will foretell the weather for us. Oh, the dear little thing!" And she held the frog caressingly to her cheek.
Therese turned to Timar in astonishment. "Sir, you are a magician! Only yesterday you could have driven this girl out of her senses with such a creature as that."
But Noémi was quite enthusiastic about the frog. While she laid the table on the veranda for supper, she delivered a complete batrachian lecture to her mother on what she had heard from Timar: how useful, as well as wise, amusing, and interesting frogs were. It was not true that they spat venom, as people said, that they crept into sleepers' mouths, sucked the milk of cows, nor that they burst with poison if you held a spider to them—all this was pure calumny and stupid superstition. They are our best friends, which guard us at night; those little soft foot-prints which are visible on the smooth sand round the house, are the consoling sign of their nightly patrol: it would be ungrateful to fear them. Timar had meanwhile prepared a small ladder of willow-twigs for the little meteorologist. He put it in a wide-mouthed bottle, which he half filled with water, and covered with a pierced paper, through which the imprisoned prophet was to receive its provision of flies. It of course went down to the bottom, and declined either to eat or to talk. Noémi welcomed this as a sign that the weather would remain fine.
"Yes, sir," said Frau Therese, as she brought out the supper to the little table at which they all sat down; "you have not only worked a miracle on Noémi, but have really done her a great benefit. Our island would have been a paradise if Noémi had not been so afraid of frogs. As soon as ever she saw one she grew quite white and got a fit of shivering. No human power would have induced her to go across the fence to where the innumerable frogs croak in the marsh. You have made a new creature of her, and reconciled her with her home."
"A sweet home!" sighed Timar. Therese sighed aloud.