The Book of Dragons
Lionel had time to see what the picture was, there was a fluttering of
great wings and a stamping of hoofs, and a sweet, soft, friendly
neighing; and there came out of the book a beautiful white horse with a
long, long, white mane and a long, long, white tail, and he had great
wings like swan's wings, and the softest, kindest eyes in the world, and
he stood there among the roses.
The Hippogriff rubbed its silky-soft, milky white nose against the
little King's shoulder, and the little King thought: "But for the wings
you are very like my poor, dear lost Rocking Horse." And the Blue Bird's
song was very loud and sweet.
Then suddenly the King saw coming through the sky the great straggling,
sprawling, wicked shape of the Red Dragon. And he knew at once what he
must do. He caught up _The Book of Beasts_ and jumped on the back of the
gentle, beautiful Hippogriff, and leaning down he whispered in the
sharp, white ear: "Fly, dear Hippogriff, fly your very fastest to the
Pebbly Waste."
And when the Dragon saw them start, he turned and flew after them, with
his great wings flapping like clouds at sunset, and the Hippogriff's
wide wings were snowy as clouds at moonrise.
When the people in the town saw the Dragon fly off after the Hippogriff
and the King they all came out of their houses to look, and when they
saw the two disappear they made up their minds to the worst, and began
to think what they would wear for Court mourning.
But the Dragon could not catch the Hippogriff. The red wings were bigger
than the white ones, but they were not so strong, and so the
white-winged horse flew away and away and away, with the Dragon
pursuing, till he reached the very middle of the Pebbly Waste.
Now, the Pebbly Waste is just like the parts of the seaside where there
is no sand--all round, loose, shifting stones, and there is no grass
there and no tree within a hundred miles of it.
Lionel jumped off the white horse's back in the very middle of the
Pebbly Waste, and he hurriedly unclasped _The Book of Beasts_ and laid
it open on the pebbles. Then he clattered among the pebbles in his haste
to get back on to his white horse, and had just jumped on when up came
the Dragon. He was flying very feebly, and looking around everywhere for
a tree, for it was just on the stroke of twelve, the sun was shining
like a gold guinea in the blue sky, and there was not a tree for a
hundred miles.
The white-winged horse flew around and around the Dragon as he writhed
on the dry pebbles. He was getting very hot: indeed, parts of him even
had begun to smoke. He knew that he must certainly catch fire in
another minute unless he could get under a tree. He made a snatch with
his red claws at the King and Hippogriff, but he was too feeble to reach
them, and besides, he did not dare to overexert himself for fear he
should get any hotter.
It was then that he saw _The Book of Beasts_ lying on the pebbles, open
at the page with "Dragon" written at the bottom. He looked and he
hesitated, and he looked again, and then, with one last squirm of rage,
the Dragon wriggled himself back into the picture and sat down under the
palm tree, and the page was a little singed as he went in.
As soon as Lionel saw that the Dragon had really been obliged to go and
sit under his own palm tree because it was the only tree there, he
jumped off his horse and shut the book with a bang.
"Oh, hurrah!" he cried. "Now we really have done it."
And he clasped the book very tightly with the turquoise and ruby clasps.
"Oh, my precious Hippogriff," he cried. "You are the bravest, dearest,
most beautiful--"
"Hush," whispered the Hippogriff modestly. "Don't you see that we are
not alone?"
And indeed there was quite a crowd round them on the Pebbly Waste: the
Prime Minister and the Parliament and the Soccer Players and the
Orphanage and the Manticora and the Rocking Horse, and indeed everyone
who had been eaten by the Dragon. You see, it was impossible for the
Dragon to take them into the book with him--it was a tight fit even for
one Dragon--so, of course, he had to leave them outside.
* * * * *
They all got home somehow, and all lived happy ever after.
When the King asked the Manticora where he would like to live he begged
to be allowed to go back into the book. "I do not care for public life,"
he said.
Of course he knew his way onto his own page, so there was no danger of
his opening the book at the wrong page and letting out a Dragon or
anything. So he got back into his picture and has never come out since:
That is why you will never see a Manticora as long as you live, except
in a picture-book. And of course he left the kitties outside, because
there was no room for them in the book--and the milk cans too.
Then the Rocking Horse begged to be allowed to go and live on the
Hippogriff's page of the book. "I should like," he said, "to live
somewhere where Dragons can't get at me."
So the beautiful, white-winged Hippogriff showed him the way in, and
there he stayed till the King had him taken out for his
great-great-great-great-grandchildren to play with.
As for the Hippogriff, he accepted the position of the King's Own
Rocking Horse--a situation left vacant by the retirement of the wooden
one. And the Blue Bird and the Butterfly sing and flutter among the
lilies and roses of the Palace garden to this very day.
II. Uncle James, or The Purple Stranger
The Princess and the gardener's boy were playing in the backyard.
"What will you do when you grow up, Princess?" asked the gardener's boy.
"I should like to marry you, Tom," said the Princess. "Would you mind?"
"No," said the gardener's boy. "I shouldn't mind much. I'll marry you if
you like--if I have time."
For the gardener's boy meant, as soon as he was grown up, to be a
general and a poet and a Prime Minister and an admiral and a civil
engineer. Meanwhile, he was top of all his classes at school, and
tip-top of the geography class.
As for the Princess Mary Ann, she was a very good little girl, and
everyone loved her. She was always kind and polite, even to her Uncle
James and to other people whom she did not like very much; and though
she was not very clever, for a Princess, she always tried to do her
lessons. Even if you know perfectly well that you can't do your lessons,
you may as well try, and sometimes you find that by some fortunate
accident they really _are_ done. Then the Princess had a truly good
heart: She was always kind to her pets. She never slapped her
hippopotamus when it broke her dolls in its playful gambols, and she
never forgot to feed her rhinoceroses in their little hutch in the
backyard. Her elephant was devoted to her, and sometimes Mary Ann made
her nurse quite cross by smuggling the dear little thing up to bed with
her and letting it go to sleep with its long trunk laid lovingly across
her throat, and its pretty head cuddled under the Royal right ear.
When the Princess had been good all through the week--for, like all
real, live, nice children, she was sometimes naughty, but never
bad--Nurse would allow her to ask her little friends to come on
Wednesday morning early and spend the day, because Wednesday is the end
of the week in that country. Then, in the afternoon, when all the little
dukes and duchesses and marquises and countesses had finished their rice
pudding and had had their hands and faces washed after it, Nurse would
say: "Now, my dears, what would you like to do this afternoon?" just as
if she didn't know. And the answer would be always the same:
"Oh, do let's go to the Zoological Gardens and ride on the big guinea
pig and feed the rabbits and hear the dormouse asleep."
So their pinafores were taken off and they all went to the Zoological
Gardens, where twenty of them could ride at a time on the guinea pig,
and where even the little ones could feed the great rabbits if some
grown-up person were kind enough to lift them up for the purpose.
There always was some such person, because in Rotundia everybody was
kind--except one.
Now that you have read as far as this you know, of course, that the
Kingdom of Rotundia was a very remarkable place; and if you are a
thoughtful child--as of course you are--you will not need me to tell you
what was the most remarkable thing about it. But in case you are not a
thoughtful child--and it is just possible of course that you are not--I
will tell you at once what that most remarkable thing was. _All the
animals were the wrong sizes!_ And this was how it happened.
In old, old, olden times, when all our world was just loose earth and
air and fire and water mixed up anyhow like a pudding, and spinning
around like mad trying to get the different things to settle into their
proper places, a round piece of earth got loose and went spinning away
by itself across the water, which was just beginning to try to get
spread out smooth into a real sea. And as the great round piece of earth
flew away, going around and around as hard as it could, it met a long
piece of hard rock that had got loose from another part of the puddingy
mixture, and the rock was so hard, and was going so fast, that it ran
its point through the round piece of earth and stuck out on the other
side of it, so that the two together were like a very-very-much-too-big
spinning top.
I am afraid all this is very dull, but you know geography is never quite
lively, and after all, I must give you a little information even in a
fairy tale--like the powder in jam.
Well, when the pointed rock smashed into the round bit of earth the
shock was so great that it set them spinning together through the
air--which was just getting into its proper place, like all the rest of
the things--only, as luck would have it, they forgot which way around
they had been going, and began to spin around the wrong way. Presently
Center of Gravity--a great giant who was managing the whole
business--woke up in the middle of the earth and began to grumble.
"Hurry up," he said. "Come down and lie still, can't you?"
So the rock with the round piece of earth fell into the sea, and the
point of the rock went into a hole that just fitted it in the stony sea
bottom, and there it spun around the wrong way seven times and then lay
still. And that round piece of land became, after millions of years, the
Kingdom of Rotundia.
This is the end of the geography lesson. And now for just a little
natural history, so that we may not feel that we are quite wasting our
time. Of course, the consequence of the island having spun around the
wrong way was that when the animals began to grow on the island they all
grew the wrong sizes. The guinea pig, as you know, was as big as our
elephants, and the elephant--dear little pet--was the size of the silly,
tiny, black-and-tan dogs that ladies carry sometimes in their muffs. The
rabbits were about the size of our rhinoceroses, and all about the wild
parts of the island they had made their burrows as big as railway
tunnels. The dormouse, of course, was the biggest of all the creatures.
I can't tell you how big he was. Even if you think of elephants it will
not help you at all. Luckily there was only one of him, and he was
always asleep. Otherwise I don't think the Rotundians could have borne
with him. As it was, they made him a house, and it saved the expense of
a brass band, because no band could possibly have been heard when the
dormouse was talking in his sleep.
The men and women and children in this wonderful island were quite the
right size, because their ancestors had come over with the Conqueror
long after the island had settled down and the animals grown on it.
Now the natural history lesson is over, and if you have been attending,