e don't!"

On which the blue Dragon clawed another handful of hair out of his
head, and all the Dragons barked as before.

How long the dreadful game went on Harry never exactly knew. Well
practised as he was in snapping in the nursery, he often failed to
think of a retort, and paid for his unreadiness by the loss of his
hair. Oh, how foolish and wearisome all this rudeness and snapping now
seemed to him! But on he had to go, wondering all the time how near it
was to twelve o'clock, and whether the Snap-Dragons would stay till
midnight and take him with them to Vesuvius.

At last, to his joy, it became evident that the brandy was coming to
an end. The Dragons moved slower, they could not leap so high, and at
last one after another they began to go out.

"Oh, if they only all of them get away before twelve!" thought poor
Harry.

At last there was only one. He and Harry jumped about and snapped and
barked, and Harry was thinking with joy that he was the last, when the
clock in the hall gave that whirring sound which some clocks do before
they strike, as if it were clearing its throat.

"Oh, _please_ go!" screamed Harry in despair.

The blue Dragon leaped up, and took such a claw-full of hair out of
the boy's head, that it seemed as if part of the skin went too. But
that leap was his last. He went out at once, vanishing before the
first stroke of twelve. And Harry was left on his face on the floor in
the darkness.

CONCLUSION.

When his friends found him there was blood on his forehead. Harry
thought it was where the Dragon had clawed him, but they said it was a
cut from a fragment of the broken brandy-bottle. The Dragons had
disappeared as completely as the brandy.

Harry was cured of snapping. He had had quite enough of it for a
lifetime, and the catch-contradictions of the household now made him
shudder. Polly had not had the benefit of his experiences, and yet she
improved also.

In the first place, snapping, like other kinds of quarrelling,
requires two parties to it, and Harry would never be a party to
snapping any more. And when he gave civil and kind answers to Polly's
smart speeches, she felt ashamed of herself, and did not repeat them.

In the second place, she heard about the Snap-Dragons. Harry told all
about it to her and to the hot-tempered gentleman.

"Now do you think it's true?" Polly asked the hot-tempered man.

"Hum! Ha!" said he, driving his hands through his hair. "You know I
warne