Paradise," and while the King gazed
enchanted at the charming picture the Blue Bird fluttered his wings on
the yellow page and spread them and flew out of the book.

Then the Prime Minister snatched the book away from the King and shut it
up on the blank page where the bird had been, and put it on a very high
shelf. And the Chancellor gave the King a good shaking, and said:
"You're a naughty, disobedient little King!" and was very angry indeed.

"I don't see that I've done any harm," said Lionel. He hated being
shaken, as all boys do; he would much rather have been slapped.

"No harm?" said the Chancellor. "Ah--but what do you know about it?
That's the question. How do you know what might have been on the next
page--a snake or a worm, or a centipede or a revolutionist, or
something like that."

"Well, I'm sorry if I've vexed you," said Lionel. "Come, let's kiss and
be friends." So he kissed the Prime Minister, and they settled down for
a nice quiet game of noughts and crosses while the Chancellor went to
add up his accounts.

But when Lionel was in bed he could not sleep for thinking of the book,
and when the full moon was shining with all her might and light he got
up and crept down to the library and climbed up and got _The Book of
Beasts_.

He took it outside to the terrace, where the moonlight was as bright as
day, and he opened the book, and saw the empty pages with "Butterfly"
and "Blue Bird of Paradise" underneath, and then he turned the next
page. There was some sort of red thing sitting under a palm tree, and
under it was written "Dragon." The Dragon did not move, and the King
shut up the book rather quickly and went back to bed.

But the next day he wanted another look, so he took the book out into
the garden, and when he undid the clasps with the rubies and turquoises,
the book opened all by itself at the picture with "Dragon" underneath,
and the sun shone full on the page. And then, quite suddenly, a great
Red Dragon came out of the book and spread vast scarlet wings and flew
away across the garden to the far hills, and Lionel was left with the
empty page before him, for the page was quite empty except for the green
palm tree and the yellow desert, and the little streaks of red where the
paintbrush had gone outside the pencil outline of the Red Dragon.

And then Lionel felt that he had indeed done it. He had not been King
twenty-four hours, and already he had let loose a Red Dragon to worry
his fait