Froggess

My name is Puffcheek—Prince Puffcheek, son of King Mud, who is sovereign in these parts; and my mother is a respectable froggess, of Italy, whose family comes out of the Po.

The tenderness of the froggess is truly touching, and is calculated to draw tears from the eyes.[…]The concluding dialogue between the frog and the froggess is equal to anything we find in the ancient ballads which, for their pathos and simplicity, are so highly remarkable.

Wake, froggess! oh, 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 scarcely seen; / No enemy is round about. / Then. froggess, rise and poke your snout, / Above the waters green.

The froggesses were, of course, far from wishing to acquire a real resemblance to their model: they felt that the piquancy of their imitation lay very much in the fact that they never could be like her enough not to remind everybody who saw them that they were decidedly different and had all the perfections of froggesses. A few froggesses, exaggerating the fashion, as foolish people sometimes will, took to pinching in their mouths in order to reduce them a little nearer to the size of hers, but even they would have greatly resented being mistaken for her.

Frogs and froggesses in decollete dresses / All joined in a sprightly quadrille; / “Swing around! Balance all!” Mr. Rana would call / To the batrachian orchestra’s trill.

An inscription in the British Museum tells us that under one of his titles Khnum was called “the King of Frogs.” There is no proof, perhaps, of his being a frog himself, but his son, Ptah, had a Frog-headed form, and his consort, Hekat, is the Froggess.[…]If this was a Totem of the Motherhood, the descent would be the same as if it were from the Goddess Hekat, only their sign is simple Frog, whereas the Frog had been elevated in status by becoming an image of the Mother as Mistress Hekat, the Froggess who typified the Divine Mother in the transforming Moon.

In the company of his vagabond friends, with a feeling of renewed youth and of delightful devilry very alluring to a middle-aged frog, Tako began to absent himself for days at a time, to the joy of his political rivals and to the vexation of his wife—an enormously bloated froggess, whose one joy was to preside over parties of lady frogs, at which water-snails and pond gossip were liberally handed round.

The moon is still too bright for frog hunting and Alice, our decoy bull-froggess, seems to be sort of peaked.