By breakfast the pond had grown a quiet crescent of tails. Tadpoles waited in a ribbon of duckweed, each taking one warm speck of light as if the lily had called their names.
We asked at the kiosk. "They do not grab at the glitter," said a man with a folded newspaper. "The first one nods, the next one waits, and the water stays still enough to count." A pencil note in the thanks book read: "My speck stayed until tea. The lily did not charge extra."
The park keeper pinned a courteous card to the railing: morning hours only, one speck to a back, duckweed tickets returned to the surface after the swim. The ducks, he added, prefer to applaud from the stones and not to skip the line.