The Book of Dragons by E. Nesbit (book reader for pc .txt) đź“–
- Author: E. Nesbit
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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 dragonproof bottle, made of burnished brass, and ran back to the wood, and to the dell, where Elfin 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 Elfin, "you hold the bottle." Then he poked and prodded the dragon with bits of stick till it crawled into the dragonproof bottle. But there was no stopper.
"Never mind," said Elfin. "I'll put my finger in for a stopper."
"No, let me," said the Princess. But of course Elfin 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 Elfin's hands, because the dragon inside was puffing fire and smoke with all his might—hotter and hotter and hotter—but Elfin held on till they came to the cliff edge, and there was the dark blue sea, and the whirlpool going around and around.
Elfin 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 Elfin. "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 Elfin 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 Elfin 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 Elfin, 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 Elfin, 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 Elfin. "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 Elfin's neck, and held him as though she would never let him go.
"Then it's all right, my dear, brave, precious Elfin," 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, Elfin'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.
See page 135.
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 toward the whirlpool they saw a cloud of steam; and the fishermen reported that the water for miles around 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 sea 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 around and around forever 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 doorplate, 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.
or The Caves and the Cockatrice
Edmund 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 tortoiseshell 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 kindhearted 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."
Other boys played truant too, of course—and these went nutting or blackberrying or wild plum gathering, but Edmund never went on the side of the town where the green woods and hedges grew. He always went up the mountain where the great rocks were, and the tall, dark pine trees, and where other people were afraid to go because of the strange noises that came out of the caves.
Edmund was not afraid of these noises—though they were very strange and terrible. He wanted to find out what made them.
One day he did. He had invented, all by himself, a very ingenious and new kind of lantern, made with a turnip and a tumbler, and when he took the candle out of Granny's bedroom candlestick to put in it, it gave quite a splendid light.
He had to go to school next day, and he was caned for being absent without leave—although he very straightforwardly explained that he had been too busy making the lantern to have time to come to school.
But the day after he got up very early and took the lunch Granny had ready for him to take to school—two boiled eggs and an apple turnover—and he took his lantern and went off as straight as a dart to the mountains to explore the caves.
The caves were very dark, but his lantern lighted them up beautifully; and they were most interesting caves, with stalactites and stalagmites and fossils, and all the things you read about in the instructive books for the young. But Edmund did not care for any of these things just then. He wanted to find out what made the noises that people were afraid of, and there was nothing in the caves to tell him.
Presently he sat down in the biggest cave and listened very carefully, and it seemed to him that he could distinguish three different sorts of noises. There was a heavy rumbling sound, like a
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