the dragon, cheerfully.
"Too lazy to make 'em, to begin with. And if I DO read other fellows my
poetry, I'm always ready to listen to theirs!"

"Oh, dear!" cried the boy, "I wish you'd try and grasp the situation
properly. When the other people find you out, they'll come after you
with spears and swords and all sorts of things. You'll have to be
exterminated, according to their way of looking at it! You're a scourge,
and a pest, and a baneful monster!"

"Not a word of truth in it," said the dragon, wagging his head solemnly.
"Character'll bear the strictest investigation. And now, there's a
little sonnet-thing I was working on when you appeared on the scene--"

"Oh, if you WON'T be sensible," cried the Boy, getting up, "I'm going
off home. No, I can't stop for sonnets; my mother's sitting up. I'll
look you up to-morrow, sometime or other, and do for goodness' sake try
and realize that you're a pestilential scourge, or you'll find yourself
in a most awful fix. Good-night!"

The Boy found it an easy matter to set the mind of his parents' at ease
about his new friend. They had always left that branch to him, and they
took his word without a murmur. The shepherd was formally introduced and
many compliments and kind inquiries were exchanged. His wife, however,
though expressing her willingness to do anything she could--to mend
things, or set the cave to rights, or cook a little something when the
dragon had been poring over sonnets and forgotten his meals, as male
things WILL do, could not be brought to recognize him formally. The fact
that he was a dragon and "they didn't know who he was" seemed to count
for everything with her. She made no objection, however, to her little
son spending his evenings with the dragon quietly, so long as he was
home by nine o'clock: and many a pleasant night they had, sitting on
the sward, while the dragon told stories of old, old times, when dragons
were quite plentiful and the world was a livelier place than it is now,
and life was full of thrills and jumps and surprises.

What the Boy had feared, however, soon came to pass. The most modest
and retiring dragon in the world, if he's as big as four cart-horses and
covered with blue scales, cannot keep altogether out of the public view.
And so in the village tavern of nights the fact that a real live dragon
sat brooding in the cave on the Downs was naturally a subject for talk.
Though the villagers were extremely frightened, they were rath