at sheet of winged whiteness broke up and fell as snow falls,
and it fell upon the sealskin dwarfs; and every snowflake of it was a
live, fluttering, hungry moth that buried its greedy nose deep in the
sealskin fur.

Grown-up people will tell you that it is not moths but moths' children
who eat fur--but this is only when they are trying to deceive you. When
they are not thinking about you they say, "I fear the moths have got at
my ermine tippet," or, "Your poor Aunt Emma had a lovely sable cloak,
but it was eaten by moths." And now there were more moths than have ever
been together in this world before, all settling on the sealskin dwarfs.

The dwarfs did not see their danger till it was too late. Then they
called for camphor and bitter apple and oil of lavender and yellow soap
and borax; and some of the dwarfs even started to get these things, but
long before any of them could get to the chemist's, all was over. The
moths ate and ate and ate till the sealskin dwarfs, being sealskin
throughout, even to the empty hearts of them, were eaten down to the
very life--and they fell one by one on the snow and so came to their
end. And all around the North Pole the snow was brown with their flat
bare pelts.

"Oh, thank you--thank you, darling Arctic moth," cried Jane. "You are
good--I do hope you haven't eaten enough to disagree with you
afterward!"

Millions of moth voices answered, with laughter as soft as moth wings,
"We should be a poor set of fellows if we couldn't over eat ourselves
once in a while--to oblige a friend."

And off they all fluttered, and the white grouse flew off, and the
sealskin dwarfs were all dead, and the fires went out, and George and
Jane were left alone in the dark with the dragon!

"Oh, dear," said Jane, "this is the worst of all!"

"We've no friends left to help us," said George. He never thought that
the dragon himself might help them--but then that was an idea that would
never have occurred to any boy.

It grew colder and colder and colder, and even under the grouse feathers
the children shivered.

Then, when it was so cold that it could not manage to be any colder
without breaking the thermometer, it stopped. And then the dragon
uncurled himself from around the North Pole, and stretched his long, icy
length over the snow, and said: "This is something like! How faint those
fires did make me feel!"

The fact was, the sealskin dwarfs had gone the wrong way to work: The
dragon had been