the abominable beast which had been warranted in this
insufficient manner to do no harm, and which I now saw angrily rearing
its head and hissing fiercely at the dead dog within three yards of my
face.

I am not one of those women who jump on chairs or tables when they see a
mouse, but I have a constitutional horror of the most harmless reptiles.
Watching the Blue Dryad as it glided across the patch of sunlight
streaming in from the open window, and knowing what it was, I confess to
being as nearly frightened out of my wits as I ever hope to be. If I had
been well, perhaps I might have managed to scream and run away. As it
was, I simply dared not speak or move a finger for fear of attracting
the beast's attention to myself. Thus I remained a terrified spectator
of the astonishing scene which followed. The whole thing seemed to me
like a dream. As the beast entered the room, I seemed again to hear my
cousin making the remark above mentioned about the cobra. _What_ animal,
I wondered dreamily, could he have meant? Not Ruby! Ruby was dead. I
looked at his stiff body again and shuddered. The whistle of a train
sounded from the valley below, and then an errand-boy passed along the
road at the back of the house (for the second or third time that day)
singing in a cracked voice the fragment of a popular melody, of which I
am sorry to say I know no more--

"I've got a little cat,
And I'm very fond of that;
But daddy wouldn't buy me a bow, wow, wow;"

the _wow-wows_ becoming fainter and further as the youth strode down the
hill. If I had been "myself," as the poor folk say, this coincidence
would have made me laugh, for at that very moment Stoffles, weary of
patting flies and spiders on the back, appeared gently purring on the
crest, so to speak, of the sofa.

It has often occurred to me since that if the scale of things had been
enlarged--if Stoffles, for example, had been a Bengal tiger, and the
Dryad a boa-constrictor or crocodile,--the tragedy which followed would
have been worthy of the pen of any sporting and dramatic historian. I
can only say that, being transacted in such objectionable proximity to
myself, the thing was as impressive as any combat of mastodon and
iguanodon could have been to primitive man.

Stoffles, as I have said, was inordinately vain and self-conscious.
Stalking along the top of the sofa-back and bearing erect the bushy
banner of her magnificent tail, she looked the most