ead, and Harry screamed,
and the blue Dragons barked and danced.

"That made your hair curl, didn't it?" asked another Dragon, leaping
over Harry.

"That's no business of yours," Harry snapped, as well as he could for
crying.

"It's more my pleasure than business," retorted the Dragon.

"Keep it to yourself, then," snapped Harry.

"I mean to share it with you, when I get hold of your hair," snapped
the Dragon.

"Wait till you get the chance," Harry snapped, with desperate presence
of mind.

"Do you know whom you're talking to?" roared the Dragon; and he opened
his mouth from ear to ear, and shot out his forked tongue in Harry's
face; and the boy was so frightened that he forgot to snap, and cried
piteously,

"Oh, I beg your pardon, please don't!"

On which the blue Dragon clawed another handful of hair out of his
head, and all the Dragons barked as before.

How long the dreadful game went on Harry never exactly knew. Well
practised as he was in snapping in the nursery, he often failed to
think of a retort, and paid for his unreadiness by the loss of his
hair. Oh, how foolish and wearisome all this rudeness and snapping now
seemed to him! But on he had to go, wondering all the time how near it
was to twelve o'clock, and whether the Snap-Dragons would stay till
midnight and take him with them to Vesuvius.

At last, to his joy, it became evident that the brandy was coming to
an end. The Dragons moved slower, they could not leap so high, and at
last one after another they began to go out.

"Oh, if they only all of them get away before twelve!" thought poor
Harry.

At last there was only one. He and Harry jumped about and snapped and
barked, and Harry was thinking with joy that he was the last, when the
clock in the hall gave that whirring sound which some clocks do before
they strike, as if it were clearing its throat.

"Oh, _please_ go!" screamed Harry in despair.

The blue Dragon leaped up, and took such a claw-full of hair out of
the boy's head, that it seemed as if part of the skin went too. But
that leap was his last. He went out at once, vanishing before the
first stroke of twelve. And Harry was left on his face on the floor in
the darkness.

CONCLUSION.

When his friends found him there was blood on his forehead. Harry
thought it was where the Dragon had clawed him, but they said it was a
cut from a fragment of the broken brandy bottle. The Dragons had
disappeared as completely as the bra