The Book of Dragons

by Edith Nesbit

  So Johnnie said, “Done,” and off he went, hand in hand with Tina, and they called on all their little friends and said: “Will you help us to save the town?”

  And all the children said: “Yes, of course we will. What fun!”

  “Well, then,” said Tina, “you must all bring your basins of bread and milk to the forge tomorrow at breakfast time.”

  “And if ever I am mayor,” said Johnnie, “I will give a banquet, and you shall be invited. And we’ll have nothing but sweet things from beginning to end.”

  All the children promised, and next morning Tina and Johnnie rolled their big washing tub down the winding stair.

  “What’s that noise?” asked the dragon.

  “It’s only a big giant breathing,” said Tina, “He’s gone by now.”

  Then, when all the town children brought their bread and milk, Tina emptied it into the wash tub, and when the tub was full Tina knocked at the iron door with the grating in it and said: “May we come in?”

  “Oh, yes,” said the dragon, “it’s very dull here.”

  So they went in, and with the help of nine other children they lifted the washing tub in and set it down by the dragon. Then all the other children went away, and Tina and Johnnie sat down and cried.

  “What’s this?” asked the dragon. “And what’s the matter?”

  “This is bread and milk,” said Johnnie; “it’s our breakfast - all of it.”

  “Well,” said the dragon, “I don’t see what you want with breakfast. I’m going to eat everyone in the town as soon as I’ve rested a little.”

  “Dear Mr. Dragon,” said Tina, “I wish you wouldn’t eat us. How would you like to be eaten yourself?”

  “Not at all,” the dragon confessed, “but nobody will eat me.”

  “I don’t know,” said Johnnie, “there’s a giant - ”

  “I know. I fought with him, and licked him.”

  “Yes, but there’s another come now - the one you fought was only this one’s little boy. This one is half as big again.”

  “He’s seven times as big,” said Tina.

  “No, nine times,” said Johnnie. “He’s bigger than the steeple.”

  “Oh, dear,” said the dragon. “I never expected this.”

  “And the mayor has told him where you are,” Tina went on, “and he is coming to eat you as soon as he has sharpened his big knife. The mayor told him you were a wild dragon - but he didn’t mind. He said he only ate wild dragons - with bread sauce.”

  “That’s tiresome,” said the dragon. “And I suppose this sloppy stuff in the tub is the bread sauce?”

  The children said it was. “Of course,” they added, “bread sauce is only served with wild dragons. Tame ones are served with apple sauce and onion stuffing. What a pity you’re not a tame one: He’d never look at you then,” they said. “Good-bye, poor dragon, we shall never see you again, and now you’ll know what it’s like to be eaten.” And they began to cry again.

  “Well, but look here,” said the dragon, “couldn’t you pretend I was a tame dragon? Tell the giant that I’m just a poor little timid tame dragon that you kept for a pet.”

  “He’d never believe it,” said Johnnie. “If you were our tame dragon we should keep you tied up, you know. We shouldn’t like to risk losing such a dear, pretty pet.”

  Then the dragon begged them to fasten him up at once, and they did so: with the collar and chains that were made years ago - in the days when men sang over their work and made it strong enough to bear any strain.

  And then they went away and told the people what they had done, and Johnnie was made mayor, and had a glorious feast exactly as he had said he would - with nothing in it but sweet things. It began with Turkish delight and halfpenny buns, and went on with oranges, toffee, coconut ice, peppermints, jam puffs, raspberry-noyeau, ice creams, and meringues, and ended with bull’s-eyes and gingerbread and acid drops.

  This was all very well for Johnnie and Tina; but if you are kind children with feeling hearts you will perhaps feel sorry for the poor deceived, deluded dragon - chained up in the dull dungeon, with nothing to do but to think over the shocking untruths that Johnnie had told him.

  When he thought how he had been tricked, the poor captive dragon began to weep - and the large tears fell down over his rusty plates. And presently he began to feel faint, as people sometimes do when they have been crying, especially if they have not had anything to eat for ten years or so.

  And then the poor creature dried his eyes and looked about him, and there he saw the tub of bread and milk. So he thought, “If giants like this damp, white stuff, perhaps I should like it too,” and he tasted a little, and liked it so much that he ate it all up.

  And the next time the tourists came, and Johnnie let off the colored fire, the dragon said shyly: “Excuse my troubling you, but could you bring me a little more bread and milk?”

  So Johnnie arranged that people should go around with carts every day to collect the children’s bread and milk for the dragon. The children were fed at the town’s expense - on whatever they liked; and they ate nothing but cake and buns and sweet things, and they said the poor dragon was very welcome to their bread and milk.

  Now, when Johnnie had been mayor ten years or so he married Tina, and on their wedding morning they went to see the dragon. He had grown quite tame, and his rusty plates had fallen off in places, and underneath he was soft and furry to stroke. So now they stroked him.

  And he said, “I don’t know how I could ever have liked eating anything but bread and milk. I am a tame dragon now, aren’t I?” And when they said that yes, he was, the dragon said: “I am so tame, won’t you undo me?” And some people would have been afraid to trust him, but Johnnie and Tina were so happy on their wedding day that they could not believe any harm of anyone in the world. So they loosened the chains, and the dragon said: “Excuse me a moment, there are one or two little things I should like to fetch,” and he moved off to those mysterious steps and went down them, out of sight into the darkness. And as he moved, more and more of his rusty plates fell off.

  In a few minutes they heard him clanking up the steps. He brought something in his mouth - it was a bag of gold.

  “It’s no good to me,” he said. “Perhaps you might find it useful.” So they thanked him very kindly.

  “More where that came from,” said he, and fetched more and more and more, till they told him to stop. So now they were rich, and so were their fathers and mothers. Indeed, everyone was rich, and there were no more poor people in the town. And they all got rich without working, which is very wrong; but the dragon had never been to school, as you have, so he knew no better.

  And as the dragon came out of the dungeon, following Johnnie and Tina into the bright gold and blue of their wedding day, he blinked his eyes as a cat does in the sunshine, and he shook himself, and the last of his plates dropped off, and his wings with them, and he was just like a very, very extra-sized cat. And from that day he grew furrier and furrier, and he was the beginning of all cats. Nothing of the dragon remained except the claws, which all cats have still, as you can easily ascertain.

  And I hope you see now how important it is to feed your cat with bread and milk. If you were to let it have nothing to eat but mice and birds it might grow larger and fiercer, and scalier and tailier, and get wings and turn into the beginning of dragons. And then there would be all the bother over again.

  The Fiery Dragon

  or The Heart of Stone and the Heart of Gold

  The little white Princess always woke in her little white bed when the starlings began to chatter in the pearl gray morning. As soon as the woods were awake, she used to run up the twisting turret-stairs with her little bare feet, and stand on the top of the tower in her white bed-gown, and kiss her hands to the sun and to the woods and to the s
leeping town, and say: “Good morning, pretty world!”

  Then she would run down the cold stone steps and dress herself in her short skirt and her cap and apron, and begin the day’s work. She swept the rooms and made the breakfast, she washed the dishes and she scoured the pans, and all this she did because she was a real Princess. For of all who should have served her, only one remained faithful - her old nurse, who had lived with her in the tower all the Princess’s life. And, now the nurse was old and feeble, the Princess would not let her work any more, but did all the housework herself, while Nurse sat still and did the sewing, because this was a real Princess with skin like milk and hair like flax and a heart like gold.

  Her name was Sabrinetta, and her grandmother was Sabra, who married St. George after he had killed the dragon, and by real rights all the country belonged to her: the woods that stretched away to the mountains, the downs that sloped down to the sea, the pretty fields of corn and maize and rye, the olive orchards and the vineyards, and the little town itself - with its towers and its turrets, its steep roofs and strange windows - that nestled in the hollow between the sea, where the whirlpool was, and the mountains, white with snow and rosy with sunrise.

  But when her father and mother had died, leaving her cousin to take care of the kingdom till she grew up, he, being a very evil Prince, took everything away from her, and all the people followed him, and now nothing was left her of all her possessions except the great dragon proof tower that her grandfather, St. George, had built, and of all who should have been her servants only the good nurse.

  This was why Sabrinetta was the first person in all the land to get a glimpse of the wonder.

  Early, early, early, while all the townspeople were fast asleep, she ran up the turret-steps and looked out over the field, and at the other side of the field there was a green, ferny ditch and a rose-thorny hedge, and then came the wood. And as Sabrinetta stood on her tower she saw a shaking and a twisting of the rose-thorny hedge, and then something very bright and shining wriggled out through it into the ferny ditch and back again. It only came out for a minute, but she saw it quite plainly, and she said to herself: “Dear me, what a curious, shiny, bright-looking creature! If it were bigger, and if I didn’t know that there have been no fabulous monsters for quite a long time now, I should almost think it was a dragon.”

  The thing, whatever it was, did look rather like a dragon - but then it was too small; and it looked rather like a lizard - only then it was too big. It was about as long as a hearthrug.

  “I wish it had not been in such a hurry to get back into the wood,” said Sabrinetta. “Of course, it’s quite safe for me, in my dragonproof tower; but if it is a dragon, it’s quite big enough to eat people, and today’s the first of May, and the children go out to get flowers in the wood.”

  When Sabrinetta had done the housework (she did not leave so much as a speck of dust anywhere, even in the corneriest corner of the winding stair) she put on her milk white, silky gown with the moon-daisies worked on it, and went up to the top of her tower again.

  Across the fields troops of children were going out to gather the may, and the sound of their laughter and singing came up to the top of the tower.

  “I do hope it wasn’t a dragon,” said Sabrinetta.

  The children went by twos and by threes and by tens and by twenties, and the red and blue and yellow and white of their frocks were scattered on the green of the field.

  “It’s like a green silk mantle worked with flowers,” said the Princess, smiling.

  Then by twos and by threes, by tens and by twenties, the children vanished into the wood, till the mantle of the field was left plain green once more.

  “All the embroidery is unpicked,” said the Princess, sighing.

  The sun shone, and the sky was blue, and the fields were quite green, and all the flowers were very bright indeed, because it was May Day.

  Then quite suddenly a cloud passed over the sun, and the silence was broken by shrieks from far off; and, like a many-colored torrent, all the children burst from the wood and rushed, a red and blue and yellow and white wave, across the field, screaming as they ran. Their voices came up to the Princess on her tower, and she heard the words threaded on their screams like beads on sharp needles: “The dragon, the dragon, the dragon! Open the gates! The dragon is coming! The fiery dragon!”

  And they swept across the field and into the gate of the town, and the Princess heard the gate bang, and the children were out of sight - but on the other side of the field the rose-thorns crackled and smashed in the hedge, and something very large and glaring and horrible trampled the ferns in the ditch for one moment before it hid itself again in the covert of the wood.

  The Princess went down and told her nurse, and the nurse at once locked the great door of the tower and put the key in her pocket.

  “Let them take care of themselves,” she said, when the Princess begged to be allowed to go out and help to take care of the children. “My business is to take care of you, my precious, and I’m going to do it. Old as I am, I can turn a key still.”

  So Sabrinetta went up again to the top of her tower, and cried whenever she thought of the children and the fiery dragon. For she knew, of course, that the gates of the town were not dragonproof, and that the dragon could just walk in whenever he liked.

  The children ran straight to the palace, where the Prince was cracking his hunting whip down at the kennels, and told him what had happened.

  “Good sport,” said the Prince, and he ordered out his pack of hippopotamuses at once. It was his custom to hunt big game with hippopotamuses, and people would not have minded that so much - but he would swagger about in the streets of the town with his pack yelping and gamboling at his heels, and when he did that, the green-grocer, who had his stall in the marketplace, always regretted it; and the crockery merchant, who spread his wares on the pavement, was ruined for life every time the Prince chose to show off his pack.

  The Prince rode out of the town with his hippopotamuses trotting and frisking behind him, and people got inside their houses as quickly as they could when they heard 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 there, since they were very strong and close. He went crawling on hands and knees in a most un-Prince-like way, and at last, finding a hollow tree, he crept into it. The wood was very still - no crashing of branches and no smell of burning came to alarm the Prince. He drained the silver hunting bottle slung from his shoulder, and stretched his legs in the hollow tree. He never shed a single tear for his poor tame hippopotamuses who had eaten from his hand and followed him faithfully in all the pleasures of the chase for so many years. For he was a false Prince, with a skin like leather and hair like hearth brushes and a heart like a stone. He never shed a tear, but he just went to sleep.

  When he awoke it was dark. He crept out of the tree and rubbed his eyes. The wood was black about him, but there was a red glow in a dell close by. It was a fire of sticks, and beside it sat a ragged youth with long, yellow hair; all around lay sleeping forms which breathed heavily.

  “Who are you?” said the Prince.

  “I’m Elfin, the pig keeper,” said the ragged youth. “And who are you?”

  “I’m Tiresome, the Prince,” said the other.

  “And what are you doing out of your palace at this time of night?” asked the pig keeper, severely.

  “I’ve been hunting,” said the Prince.

  The pig keeper laughed. “Oh, it was you I saw, then? A good hunt, wasn’t it? My pigs and I were looking on.”