hose darting splendors.

A few moments more and he gained the edge of an open glade which led
straight to the water. He paused behind the screening leaves. Out over
the water a bar of ruby light, surrounded by a globe of rose-pink
mist, shot by and vanished from his narrow field of vision. He was
just about to thrust out his head and crane his neck to follow the
gorgeous apparition, when a peculiar dry rustling in the air above
checked him. He glanced up cautiously, and saw hovering, not more than
twenty or thirty yards away, a beautiful and dreadful being.

In shape it was exactly like a dragon-fly; but the length of its
flaming violet body was greater than that of Grom's longest arrow. The
spread of its two pairs of transparent, crystal-shining, colorless
wings was even greater than the length of its body. Its enormous eyes,
wells of purple fire which took up the whole of the top and sides of
its monstrous head, seemed to see everywhere at once; and Grom
shivered with the feeling that they had spied him out and were peering
into his very soul.

The awful eyes may have seen him, indeed; but at that moment they
spied out something else which apparently concerned them more. With a
pounce like a flash of violet lightning--and, indeed, almost as
swift--the bright shape swooped to the grass. The four shining wings
waved there for a moment, and there seemed to be a mild struggle. Then
the giant fly rose again, lightly, into the air, holding in the clutch
of its six slender, jointed legs the body of one of those black,
rat-like animals which Grom knew so well as infesting the grass of all
meadows near the water. The captor flew to a naked branch near the
waterside, alighted upon it, and proceeded to make its meal, holding
up the body between the end joints of its front pair of legs and
turning it over and over deftly while its appalling jaws both crushed
and mangled it. The process was amazingly swift. In the space of a
couple of minutes all the blood, flesh, and soft material of the rat
were squeezed out and sucked down. The remnants were rolled into a
hard little ball, perfectly spherical, and scornfully tossed aside.
And the monster, leaping into the air with a rustle of its glittering
wings, flashed off over the water.

Almost in the same moment an amazingly loud rustle, like the sweep of
a fierce gust of rain upon a rank of palmetto leaves, filled the air
above the glade, and Grom, looking up with a start, saw a grea