Anything more disagreeable than being shaken up in a glass bottle, with
beetles, and boatmen, and larvae of all sorts and sizes, including a
dragon-fly in the second stage of his career, I can hardly imagine. When
they took us out and put us into the glass pond, matters were certainly
better, though there is a vast difference between a glass pond and a
pond in a wood.
The first day it was by no means a bad imitation of a real pond, except
for the want of a bed of mud. Molly had covered the bottom of the glass
with gravel which she had steadily washed till water would run clear
from it, in spite of the impatient exclamations of Francis, that it
"would do now," and quite regardless of the inconvenience to which I was
subjected by being kept in the pickle-jar. In this gravel she had
embedded the roots of some Water Crowfoot and other pond-plants. The
stones in the middle were nicely arranged, and well covered with moss
and water-weeds. When water had been poured in up to the brim of the
bell-glass, and we had been emptied out of the jars, the dragon-fly
larva got into a good hole among the stones and ate most of the May-fly
grubs, water-shrimps, and so forth, as they came into sight.
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