f brimstone, I really can't help it, and I
once met a man whose breath smelled of onions, which I consider far
worse."

"I don't," said Betsy; "I love onions.

"And I love brimstone," declared the dragon, "so don't let us quarrel
over one another's peculiarities."

Saying this, he breathed a long breath and shot a flame fifty feet from
his mouth. The brimstone made Betsy cough, but she remembered about the
onions and said nothing.

They had no idea how far they had gone through the center of the earth,
nor when to expect the trip to end. At one time the little girl
remarked:

"I wonder when we'll reach the bottom of this hole. And isn't it funny,
Shaggy Man, that what is the bottom to us now, was the top when we fell
the other way?"

"What puzzles me," said Files, "is that we are able to fall both ways."

"That," announced Tik-Tok, "is be-cause the world is round."

"Exactly," responded Shaggy. "The machinery in your head is in fine
working order, Tik-Tok. You know, Betsy, that there is such a thing as
the Attraction of Gravitation, which draws everything toward the center
of the earth. That is why we fall out of bed, and why everything clings
to the surface of the earth."

"Then why doesn't everyone go on down to the center of the earth?"
inquired the little girl.

"I was afraid you were going to ask me that," replied Shaggy in a sad
tone. "The reason, my dear, is that the earth is so solid that other
solid things can't get through it. But when there's a hole, as there is
in this case, we drop right down to the center of the world."

"Why don't we stop there?" asked Betsy.

"Because we go so fast that we acquire speed enough to carry us right
up to the other end."

"I don't understand that, and it makes my head ache to try to figure it
out," she said after some thought. "One thing draws us to the center
and another thing pushes us away from it. But--"

"Don't ask me why, please," interrupted the Shaggy Man. "If you can't
understand it, let it go at that."

"Do you understand it?" she inquired.

"All the magic isn't in fairyland," he said gravely. "There's lots of
magic in all Nature, and you may see it as well in the United States,
where you and I once lived, as you can here."

"I never did," she replied.

"Because you were so used to it all that you didn't realize it was
magic. Is anything more wonderful than to see a flower grow and
blossom, or to get light out of the electricity in the air? T