, and then I
shall know. Come on."

So Jane came on; and when they got close to the clear, tall, beautiful
flames they saw that there was a great, queer-shaped lump of ice all
around the bottom of the Pole--clear, smooth, shining ice, that was
deep, beautiful Prussian blue, like icebergs, in the thick parts, and
all sorts of wonderful, glimmery, shimmery, changing colors in the thin
parts, like the cut-glass chandelier in Grandmamma's house in London.

"It is a very curious shape," said Jane. "It's almost like"--she moved
back a step to get a better view of it--"it's almost like a dragon."

"It's much more like the lampposts on the Thames Embankment," said
George, who had noticed a curly thing like a tail that went twisting up
the North Pole.

"Oh, George," cried Jane, "it _is_ a dragon; I can see its wings.
Whatever shall we do?"

And, sure enough, it _was_ a dragon--a great, shining, winged, scaly,
clawy, big-mouthed dragon--made of pure ice. It must have gone to sleep
curled around the hole where the warm steam used to come up from the
middle of the earth, and then when the earth got colder, and the column
of steam froze and was turned into the North Pole, the dragon must have
got frozen in his sleep--frozen too hard to move--and there he stayed.
And though he was very terrible he was very beautiful too.

Jane said so, but George said, "Oh, don't bother; I'm thinking how to
get onto the Pole and try the compass without waking the brute."

[Illustration: "Sure enough, it was a dragon." _See page 68._]

The dragon certainly was beautiful, with his deep, clear Prussian
blueness, and his rainbow-colored glitter. And rising from within the
cold coil of the frozen dragon the North Pole shot up like a pillar made
of one great diamond, and every now and then it cracked a little, from
sheer cold. The sound of the cracking was the only thing that broke the
great white silence in the midst of which the dragon lay like an
enormous jewel, and the straight flames went up all around him like the
stalks of tall lilies.

And as the children stood there looking at the most wonderful sight
their eyes had ever seen, there was a soft padding of feet and a
hurry-scurry behind them, and from the outside darkness beyond the
flame-stalks came a crowd of little brown creatures running, jumping,
scrambling, tumbling head over heels and on all fours, and some even
walking on their heads. They joined hands as they came near the fires