The best I can do is to show you a picture of one. Some day we may find
it in the pond.

[Illustration]

Those two feather-like parts at the tail end are gills.

Yes, John, it can propel itself through the water by rowing, as it were,
with these gills.

There are some species of dragon fly larvæ that swim by moving the tip
of the abdomen from side to side, as a fish moves its body when it
swims.

But now let us return to our funny larva that lives at the bottom of the
pond. It stays down there, eating and growing and moulting, for nine or
ten months or even longer; then something very wonderful happens.

It suddenly feels a great desire to get up to the top of the pond.

[Illustration]

It climbs up a weed or a stick until it is clear out of the water.

Then its skin splits down the back for the last time, and out there
pulls itself, not a larva, but a weak-looking dragon fly, with soft and
flabby little wings.

Now is its hour of danger, and now is the time for such birds as like
the taste of young dragon flies to help themselves.