failed with w&ter by rain and melting snow in April, with 
aquatic creasture of wondrous form and hues, which we boys used 
to dip up and take home in preserve jars or similar glass 
receptacles. They were a scant inch in length, as I remember 
them, and swam on their backs by means of delicate and numerous 
plume-like filaments waving rhythmically. Some were salmon, 
others pinkish, still others almost rose—colored. I have never 
seen anything like them since until this spring when Mr. Dexter 
informed me that he was accustomed to finding them near 
Providence and that Harry Richardson knew of a pond hold near 
Fairhaven Bay where they occur. We intended to look for them 
there but having no good opportunity sought and found them 
abundantly in two pools behind Ball’s Hill. All we examined 
there, however, were dull olive green. Edward Emerson thinks 
this their normal color but Dexter has seen pink and rose-tinted 
ones like those we used to get in Cambridge. He called them 
!! Fairy Shrimp” and says that the scientific name is Branchlppus . 
Emerson knows them as ’’Mermaids” and with Ned Bartlett was wont, 
in his youth, to find them in a little -pond near Fairyland. H e 
thinks that the Concord ones are never brilliantly colored but 
Dexter opines that they are so in early spring. I am inclined 
to suspect that those we sav/ near Ball’s hill must belong to a 
different species from those inhabiting the Cambridge pool in 
times long past. The former was not only much duller colored 
but also more lively and wary, darting off like tiny Pckerel 
when closely approached. We caught a few and took them t the 
berm in a glass jar but they all d/ied during the following night. 
