She had now reached a length of two inches, and her delicate colors and waving fins made her daily more marvelous. The strange thing about the hind limbs was that, although so large and perfect, they were quite useless. They could not even be unflexed; and other mere pollywogs near by were wriggling toes, calves, and thighs while yet these were but imperfect buds. When she dived suddenly, the toes occasionally moved a little; but as a whole, they merely sagged and drifted like some extraneous things entangled in the body.
Smoothly and gracefully Guinevere moved about the aquarium. Her gills lifted and closed rhythmically—twice as slowly as compared with the three or four times every second of her breathless young tadpolehood. Several times on the fourteenth day, she came quietly to the surface for a gulp of air.
Looking at her from above, two little bulges were visible on either side of the body—the ensheathed elbows pressing outward. Twice, when she lurched forward in alarm, I saw these front limbs jerk spasmodically; and when she was resting quietly, they rubbed and pushed impatiently against their mittened tissue.
And now began a restless shifting, a slow, strange dance in mid-water, wholly unlike any movement of her smaller companions; up and down, slowly revolving on oblique planes, with rhythmical turns and sinkings—this continued for an hour, when I was called for lunch. And as if to punish me for this material digression and desertion, when I returned, in half an hour, the miracle had happened.
Guinevere still danced in stately cadence, with the other Redfins at a distance going about their several businesses. She danced alone—a dance of change, of happenings of tremendous import, of symbolism as majestic as it was age-old. Here in this little glass aquarium the tadpole Guinevere had just freed her arms—she, with waving scarlet fins, watching me with lidless white and staring eyes, still with fish-like, fin-bound body. She danced upright, with new-born arms folded across her breast, tail-tip flagellating frenziedly, stretching long fingers with disks like cymbals, reaching out for the land she had never trod, limbs flexed for leaps she had never made.
A few days before and Guinevere had been a fish, then a helpless biped, and now suddenly, somewhere between my salad and coffee, she became an aquatic quadruped. Strangest of all, her hands were mobile, her feet useless; and when the dance was at an end, and she sank slowly to the bottom, she came to rest on the very tips of her two longest fingers; her legs and toes still drifting high and useless. Just before she ceased, her arms stretched out right froggily, her weird eyes rolled about, and she gulped a mighty gulp of the strange thin medium that covered the surface of her liquid home.
At midnight of this same day only three things existed in the world—on my table I turned from the Bhagavad-Gita to Drinkwater's Reverie and back again; then I looked up to the jar of clear water and watched Guinevere hovering motionless. At six the next morning she was crouched safely on a bit of paper a foot from the aquarium. She had missed the open window, the four-foot drop to the floor, and a neighboring aquarium stocked with voracious fish: surely the gods of pollywogs were kind to me. The great fins were gone—dissolved into blobs of dull pink; the tail was a mere stub, the feet drawn close, and a glance at her head showed that Guinevere had become a frog almost within an hour. Three things I hastened to observe: the pupils of her eyes were vertical, revealing her genus Phyllomedusa (making apt our choice of the feminine); by a gentle urging I saw that the first and second toes were equal in length; and a glance at her little humped back showed a scattering of white calcareous spots, giving the clue to her specific personality—bicolor: thus were we introduced to Phyllomedusa bicolor, alias Guinevere, and thus was established beyond doubt her close relationship to Gawain.
During that first day, within three hours, during most of which I watched her closely, Guinevere's change in color was beyond belief. For an hour she leaped from time to time; but after that, and for the rest of her life, she crept in strange unfroglike fashion, raised high on all four limbs, with her stubby tail curled upward, and reaching out one weird limb after another. If one's hand approached within a foot, she saw it and stretched forth appealing, skinny fingers.
At two o'clock she was clad in a general cinnamon buff; then a shade of glaucous green began to creep over head and upper eyelids, onward over her face, finally coloring body and limbs. Beneath, the little pollyfrog fairly glowed with bright apricot orange, throat and tail amparo purple, mouth green, and sides rich pale blue. To this maze of color we must add a strange, new expression, born of the prominent eyes, together with the line of the mouth extending straight back with a final jeering, upward lift; in front, the lower lip thick and protruding, which, with the slanting eyes, gave a leering, devilish smirk, while her set, stiff, exact posture compelled a vivid thought of the sphinx. Never have I seen such a remarkable combination. It fascinated us. We looked at Guinevere, and then at the tadpoles swimming quietly in their tank, and evolution in its wildest conceptions appeared a tame truism.
This was the acme of Guinevere's change, the pinnacle of her development. Thereafter her transformations were rhythmical, alternating with the day and night. Through the nights of activity she was garbed in rich, warm brown. With the coming of dawn, as she climbed slowly upward, her color shifted through chestnut to maroon; this maroon then died out on the mid-back to a delicate, dull violet-blue, which in turn became obscured in the sunlight by turquoise, which crept slowly along the sides. Carefully and laboriously she clambered up, up to the topmost frond, and there performed her little toilet, scraping head and face with her hands, passing the hinder limbs over her back to brush off every grain of sand. The eyes had meanwhile lost their black-flecked, golden, nocturnal iridescence, and had gradually paled to a clear silvery blue, while the great pupil of darkness narrowed to a slit.