Even Sylvie gave a little gasp, and allowed three of the Frogs, who seemed to be getting tired of the entertainment, to hop away into the ditch, without attempting to stop them.
"Please, Mister Sir, will oo make Sylvie attend?" Sylvie was silenced, and was all attention: in fact, she and I were most of the audience now, as the Frogs kept hopping away, and there were very few of them left.
This was evidently the Moral: so Sylvie made her final proclamation to the Frogs. "The Story's finished!
I did not feel quite clear about it myself, so made no suggestion: but the Frogs seemed quite content, Moral or no Moral, and merely raised a husky chorus of "Off!
As Mark Twain says, 'Eat a live
frog first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day'.
The researchers, whose findings were published in October in Ecological Applications, suggest that
frog populations in El Cope underwent ecological and/or evolutionary changes that enabled the community as a whole to persist, despite severe species losses.