the voices of his pack and the blowing of his
horn. The pack squeezed through the town gates and off across country to
hunt the dragon. Few of you who had not seen a pack of hippopotamuses in
full cry will be able to imagine at all what the hunt was like. To begin
with, hippopotamuses do not bay like hounds: They grunt like pigs, and
their grunt is very big and fierce. Then, of course, no one expects
hippopotamuses to jump. They just crash through the hedges and lumber
through the standing corn, doing serious injury to the crops, and
annoying the farmers very much. All the hippopotamuses had collars with
their name and address on, but when the farmers called at the palace to
complain of the injury to their standing crops, the Prince always said
it served them right for leaving their crops standing about in people's
way, and he never paid anything at all.

So now, when he and his pack went out, several people in the town
whispered, "I wish the dragon would eat him"--which was very wrong of
them, no doubt, but then he was such a very nasty Prince.

They hunted by field, and they hunted by wold; they drew the woods
blank, and the scent didn't lie on the downs at all. The dragon was shy,
and would not show himself.

But just as the Prince was beginning to think there was no dragon at
all, but only a cock and bull, his favourite old hippopotamus gave
tongue. The Prince blew his horn and shouted: "Tally ho! Hark forward!
Tantivy!" and the whole pack charged downhill toward the hollow by the
wood. For there, plain to be seen, was the dragon, as big as a barge,
glowing like a furnace, and spitting fire and showing his shining teeth.

"The hunt is up!" cried the Prince. And indeed it was. For the
dragon--instead of behaving as a quarry should, and running away--ran
straight at the pack, and the Prince, on his elephant, had the
mortification of seeing his prize pack swallowed up one by one in the
twinkling of an eye, by the dragon they had come out to hunt. The dragon
swallowed all the hippopotamuses just as a dog swallows bits of meat. It
was a shocking sight. Of the whole of the pack that had come out
sporting so merrily to the music of the horn, now not even a
puppy-hippopotamus was left, and the dragon was looking anxiously around
to see if he had forgotten anything.

The Prince slipped off his elephant on the other side and ran into the
thickest part of the wood. He hoped the dragon could not break through
the bushes t