frogess

A female frog (amphibian).

The night was warm, the pool was still, / No sound was heard from lake or hill, / Save where, upon a log decayed, / A bull-frog croaked his serenade: / Wake, frogess of my love, awake, / And listen to my song; / The heron roosts far from the lake, / The pickerel his rest doth take / The water-weeds among. // The sun has put his fire out, / The daylight’s hardly seen, / No enemy is round about; / Then frogess poke thy lovely snout / Above the waters green.

These superstitions and traditions were all odd and strange beliefs, which mingled the materialistic and the spiritual most incongruously; but they were not so degrading, and they were not so far from truth as the “enlightened” ideas respecting our origin, circulated in costly volumes during recent years, by authors whose Adam and Eve were frogs, formed from slime by the action of the sun, with a dash of electricity, and in which, from gratitude for their descent, their progeny for centuries, millenniums, or millionenniums wallowed. At last a frog or frogess—or both may have been required—became a little better than other animals of the same origin, and they pushed out of the slime, and became rats, or squirrels, or something else, while others degenerated at the same time into eels, and progressed upwards to serpents after their first decadence.

A Frenchwoman.

Do Frogs like children? I am not terribly convinced they do. Before I get pelted with tomatoes by indignant Frogesses, could I simply ask you to draw your own conclusion from the large number of abusive terms used to describe children? Our “brats” is nothing compared with the variety of French names that have the same meaning but are too often used instead of “kids.”

— I go on. To Dover and then take ship for France. / — God help us, you are indeed up. That sounds like state business. / — War on the papists. / — For God’s sake leave at least the English papishes alone, they have suffered enough. There is enough trouble here with the frogs and frogesses. The little froglings would grow up into proper Kent citizens if they were permitted to speak our tongue.