The Book of Dragons (16 page)

The Princess could not walk through the streets of the town in her milky-silky gown with the daisies on it, and with no hat and no gloves, so she turned the other way, and ran out across the meadows, towards the wood. She had never been out of her tower before, and the soft grass under her feet felt like grass of Paradise.

She ran right into the thickest part of the wood, because she did not know what her heart was made of, and she was afraid of the dragon, and there in a dell she came on Elfinn and his five-and-seventy fine pigs. He was playing his flute, and around him the pigs were dancing cheerfully on their hind legs.

“Oh, dear,” said the Princess, “do take care of me. I am so frightened.”

“I will,” said Elfinn, putting his arms round her. “Now you are quite safe. What were you frightened of?”

“The dragon,” she said.

“So it’s got out of the silver bottle,” said Elfinn. “I hope it’s eaten the Prince.”

“No,” said Sabrinetta; “but why?”

So he told her of the mean trick that the Prince had played him.

“And he promised me half his kingdom and the hand of his cousin the Princess,” said Elfinn.

“Oh, dear, what a shame!” said Sabrinetta, trying to get out of his arms. “How dared he?”

“What’s the matter?” he asked, holding her tighter; “it
was
a shame, or at least I thought so. But
now
he may keep his kingdom, half and whole, if I may keep what I have.”

“What’s that?” asked the Princess.

“Why, you—my pretty, my dear,” said Elfinn, “and as for the Princess, his cousin—forgive me, dearest heart, but when I asked for her I hadn’t seen the real Princess, the only Princess,
my
Princess.”

“Do you mean me?” said Sabrinetta.

“Who else?” he asked.

“Yes, but five minutes ago you hadn’t seen me!”

“Five minutes ago I was a pig-keeper—now I’ve held you in my arms I’m a Prince, though I should have to keep pigs to the end of my days.”

“But you haven’t asked
me,”
said the Princess.

“You
asked
me
to take care of you,” said Elfinn, “and I will—all my life long.”

So that was settled, and they began to talk of really important things, such as the dragon and the Prince, and all the time Elfinn did not know that this was the Princess, but he knew that she had a heart of gold: and he told her so, many times.

“The mistake,” said Elfinn, “was in not having a dragon-proof bottle. I see that now.”

“Oh, is that all?” said the Princess. “I can easily get you one of those—because everything in my tower is dragon-proof. We ought to do something to settle the dragon and save the little children.”

So she started off to get the bottle, and she would not let Elfinn come with her.

“If what you say is true,” she said—“if you are sure that I have a heart of gold, the dragon won’t hurt me, and somebody
must
stay with the pigs.”

Elfinn was quite sure, so he let her go.

She found the door of her tower open. The dragon had waited patiently for the Prince, and the moment he opened the door and came out, though he was only out for an instant to post a letter to his Prime Minister, saying where he was, and asking them to send the fire brigade to deal with the fiery dragon, the dragon ate him. Then the dragon went back to the wood, because it was getting near his time to grow small for the night.

So Sabrinetta went in and kissed her nurse, and made her a cup of tea and explained what was going to happen, and that she had a heart of gold, so the dragon couldn’t eat her; and the nurse saw that, of course, the Princess was quite safe, and kissed her and let her go.

She took the dragon-proof bottle, made of burnished brass, and ran back to the wood, and to the dell where Elfinn was sitting among his sleek black pigs, waiting for her.

“I thought you were never coming back,” he said; “you have been away a year, at least.”

The Princess sat down beside him among the pigs, and they held each other’s hands till it was dark, and then the dragon came crawling over the moss, scorching it as he came, and getting smaller as he crawled, and curled up under the root of the tree.

“Now, then,” said Elfinn, “you hold the bottle”—then he poked and prodded the dragon with bits of stick till it crawled into the dragon-proof bottle. But there was no stopper.

“Never mind,” said Elfinn, “I’ll put my finger in for a stopper.”

“No, let me,” said the Princess; but, of course, Elfinn would not let her. He stuffed his finger into the top of the bottle, and the Princess cried out:

“The sea—the sea—run for the cliffs!” And off they went, with the five-and-seventy pigs trotting steadily after them in a long, black procession.

The bottle got hotter and hotter in Elfinn’s hands, because the dragon inside was pulling fire and smoke with all his might. Hotter, and hotter, and hotter, but Elfinn held on
till they came to the cliff-edge, and there was the dark-blue sea, and the whirlpool going round and round.

Elfinn lifted the bottle high above his head and hurled it out between the stars and the sea, and it fell in the middle of the whirlpool.

“We’ve saved the country,” said the Princess. “You’ve saved the little children. Give me your hands.”

“I can’t,” said Elfinn; “I shall never be able to take your dear hands again. My hands are burnt off.”

And so they were: there were only black cinders where his hands ought to have been. The Princess kissed them, and cried over them, and tore pieces of her silky-milky gown to tie them up with, and the two went back to the tower and told the nurse all about everything. And the pigs sat outside and waited.

“He is the bravest man in the world,” said Sabrinetta. “He has saved the country and the little children; but, oh, his hands—his poor, dear, darling hands!”

Here the door of the room opened, and the oldest of the five-and-seventy pigs came in. It went up to Elfinn and rubbed itself against him with little, loving grunts.

“See the dear creature,” said the nurse, wiping away a tear; “it knows, it knows!”

Sabrinetta stroked the pig, because Elfinn had no hands for stroking or for anything else.

“The only cure for a dragon burn,” said the old nurse, “is pig’s fat, and well that faithful creature knows it—”

“I wouldn’t for a kingdom,” cried Elfinn, stroking the pig as best he could with his elbow.

“Is there no other cure?” asked the Princess.

Here another pig put its black nose in at the door, and then another and another, till the room was full of pigs, a surging mass of rounded blackness, pushing and struggling to get at Elfinn, and grunting softly in the language of true affection.

“There is
one
other,” said the nurse; “the dear, affectionate beasts—they all want to die for you.”

“What
is
the other cure?” said Sabrinetta, anxiously.

“If a man is burnt by a dragon,” said the nurse, “and a certain number of people are willing to die for him, it is enough if each should kiss the burn, and wish it well in the depths of his loving heart.”

“The number! The number!” cried Sabrinetta.

“Seventy-seven,” said the nurse.

“We have only seventy-five pigs,” said the Princess, “and with me that’s seventy-six!”

“It must be seventy-seven—and I really
can’t
die for him, so nothing can be done,” said the nurse, sadly. “He must have cork hands.”

“I knew about the seventy-seven loving people,” said Elfinn. “But I never thought my dear pigs loved me so much as all this, and my dear, too—And, of course, that only makes it more impossible. There’s
one
other charm that cures dragon burns, though; but I’d rather be burnt black all over than marry anyone but you, my dear, my pretty.”

“Why, who must you marry to cure your dragon burns?” asked Sabrinetta.

“A Princess. That’s how St. George cured
his
burns.”

“There now! Think of that!” said the nurse. “And I never heard tell of that cure, old as I am.”

But Sabrinetta threw her arms round Elfinn’s neck, and held him as though she would never let him go.

“Then it’s all right, my dear, brave, precious Elfinn,” she cried, “for I
am
a Princess, and you shall be my Prince. Come along, nurse—don’t wait to put on your bonnet. We’ll go and be married this very moment.”

So they went, and the pigs came after, moving in stately blackness, two by two. And, the minute he was married to the Princess, Elfinn’s hands got quite well. And the people, who were weary of Prince Tiresome and his hippopotamuses, hailed Sabrinetta and her husband as rightful Sovereigns of the land.

Next morning the Prince and Princess went out to see if the dragon had been washed ashore. They could see nothing of him; but when they looked out towards the whirlpool they saw a cloud of steam; and the fishermen reported that the water for miles round was hot enough to shave with! And as the water is hot there to this day, we may feel pretty sure that the fierceness of that dragon was such that all the waters of all the seas were not enough to cool him. The whirlpool is too strong for him to be able to get out of it, so there he spins round and round for ever and ever, doing some useful work at last, and warming the water for poor fisher-folk to shave with. The Prince and Princess rule the land well and wisely. The nurse lives with them, and does nothing but fine sewing, and only that when she wants to very much. The Prince keeps no hippopotamuses, and is consequently very popular. The five-and-seventy devoted pigs live in white marble sties with brass knockers and “Pig” on the door-plate, and are washed twice a day with Turkish sponges and soap scented with violets, and no one objects to
their
following the Prince when he walks abroad, for they behave beautifully, and always keep to the footpath, and obey the notices about not walking on the grass. The Princess feeds them every day with her own hands, and her first edict on coming to the throne was that the word “Pork” should never be uttered on pain of death, and should, besides, be scratched out of all the dictionaries.

They saw a cloud of steam

E
dmund was a boy. The people who did not like him said that he was the most tiresome boy that ever lived, but his grandmother and his other friends said that he had an inquiring mind. And his granny often added that he was the best of boys. But she was very kind and very old.

Edmund loved to find out about things. Perhaps you will think that in that case he was constant in his attendance at school, since there, if anywhere, we may learn whatever there is to be learned. But Edmund did not want to learn things: he wanted to find things out, which is quite different. His inquiring mind led him to take clocks to pieces to see what made them go, to take locks off doors to see what made them stick. It was Edmund who cut open the india-rubber ball to see
what made it bounce, and he never
did
see, any more than you did when you tried the same experiment.

Edmund lived with his grandmother. She loved him very much, in spite of his inquiring mind, and hardly scolded him at all when he frizzled up her tortoiseshell comb in his anxiety to find out whether it was made of real tortoise shell or of something that would burn. Edmund went to school, of course, now and then, and sometimes he could not prevent himself from learning something, but he never did it on purpose.

“It is such waste of time,” said he; “they only know what everybody knows. I want to find out new things that nobody has thought of but me.”

“I don’t think you’re likely to find out anything that none of the wise men in the whole world have thought of all these thousands of years,” said granny.

But Edmund did not agree with her. He played truant whenever he could, for he was a kind-hearted boy, and could not bear to think of a master’s time and labor being thrown away on a boy like himself—who did not wish to learn, only to find out—when there were so many worthy lads thirsting for instruction in geography and history, and reading and ciphering, and Mr. Smiles’s “Self-Help.”