had so suddenly hidden itself. Faint imprints showed where a casual bird
had alighted, but of other traffic there was next to no sign; which made
these strange tracks all the more puzzling.

We came across them first at the corner of the shrubbery, and pored over
them long, our hands on our knees. Experienced trappers that we knew
ourselves to be, it was annoying to be brought up suddenly by a beast we
could not at once identify.

"Don't you know?" said Charlotte, rather scornfully. "Thought you knew
all the beasts that ever was."

This put me on my mettle, and I hastily rattled off a string of animal
names embracing both the arctic and the tropic zones, but without much
real confidence.

"No," said Charlotte, on consideration; "they won't any of 'em quite do.
Seems like something LIZARDY. Did you say a iguanodon? Might be that,
p'raps. But that's not British, and we want a real British beast. _I_
think it's a dragon!"

"'T isn't half big enough," I objected.

"Well, all dragons must be small to begin with," said Charlotte: "like
everything else. P'raps this is a little dragon who's got lost. A little
dragon would be rather nice to have. He might scratch and spit, but he
couldn't DO anything really. Let's track him down!"

So we set off into the wide snow-clad world, hand in hand, our hearts
big with expectation,--complacently confident that by a few smudgy
traces in the snow we were in a fair way to capture a half-grown
specimen of a fabulous beast.

We ran the monster across the paddock and along the hedge of the next
field, and then he took to the road like any tame civilized tax-payer.
Here his tracks became blended with and lost among more ordinary
footprints, but imagination and a fixed idea will do a great deal, and
we were sure we knew the direction a dragon would naturally take.
The traces, too, kept reappearing at intervals--at least Charlotte
maintained they did, and as it was HER dragon I left the following of
the slot to her and trotted along peacefully, feeling that it was an
expedition anyhow and something was sure to come out of it.

Charlotte took me across another field or two, and through a copse, and
into a fresh road; and I began to feel sure it was only her confounded
pride that made her go on pretending to see dragon-tracks instead of
owning she was entirely at fault, like a reasonable person. At last she
dragged me excitedly through a gap in a hedge of an obviously private
character;