the dragon: so fearful and grim.
So-o grim: and so-o fierce: that now may we say
All peaceful is our wakin': on Chri-istmas Day!"

The singer receded, the carol died away. But I wondered, with my hand
on the door-latch, whether that was the song, or something like it, that
the dragon sang as he toddled contentedly up the hill.

A DEPARTURE

It is a very fine thing to be a real Prince. There are points about
a Pirate Chief, and to succeed to the Captaincy of a Robber Band is a
truly magnificent thing. But to be an Heir has also about it something
extremely captivating. Not only a long-lost heir--an heir of the
melodrama, strutting into your hitherto unsuspected kingdom at just the
right moment, loaded up with the consciousness of unguessed merit and
of rights so long feloniously withheld--but even to be a common
humdrum domestic heir is a profession to which few would refuse to be
apprenticed.

To step from leading-strings and restrictions and one glass of port
after dinner, into property and liberty and due appreciation, saved up,
polished and varnished, dusted and laid in lavender, all expressly
for you--why, even the Princedom and the Robber Captaincy, when their
anxieties and responsibilities are considered, have hardly more to
offer. And so it will continue to be a problem, to the youth in whom
ambition struggles with a certain sensuous appreciation of life's
side-dishes, whether the career he is called upon to select out of the
glittering knick-knacks that strew the counter had better be that of an
heir or an engine-driver.

In the case of eldest sons, this problem has a way of solving itself. In
childhood, however, the actual heirship is apt to work on the principle
of the "Borough-English" of our happier ancestors, and in most cases
of inheritance it is the youngest that succeeds. Where the "res" is
"angusta," and the weekly books are simply a series of stiff hurdles
at each of which in succession the paternal legs falter with growing
suspicion of their powers to clear the flight, it is in the affair of
CLOTHES that the right of succession tells, and "the hard heir strides
about the land" in trousers long ago framed for fraternal limbs--frondes
novas et non sua poma. A bitter thing indeed! Of those pretty silken
threads that knit humanity together, high and low, past and present,
none is tougher, more pervading, or more iridescent, than the honest,
simple pleasure of new clothes.

It