"To understand Arabic."

"And further?"

Dick Compton closed his book and placed it carefully in a leather
case.

"It is a pity you were born curious, Venning, otherwise you would
have made an excellent companion for a studious man. 'Why do I wish
to understand Arabic?' Why do you stand on one leg watching a
tadpole shed its tail."

"Excuse me, I always sit down to watch a tadpole."

"Yet I have seen you poised on one leg for an hour like a heron,
afraid to put down the other foot lest you should scare some
wretched pollywog. Why?"

"I do it for the love of the thing, Dick. What is a page of your
crooked signs compared with a single green pond and all that it
holds?"

"By Jove! Is that so--and would you find a volume in a caterpillar?"

"Why not? Listen to me, Dick. Take the silver-spiked caterpillar,
with a skin of black satin and a length that runs to four inches. He
lives his life in the topmost boughs of an African palm--a feathered
dome amid the forest--and there beneath the blue sky he browses till
he descends into the warm earth to sleep in chrysalis form before he