e sky was blue, and the fields were quite green,
and all the flowers were very bright indeed, because it was May Day.

Then quite suddenly a cloud passed over the sun, and the silence was
broken by shrieks from far off; and, like a many-colored torrent, all
the children burst from the wood and rushed, a red and blue and yellow
and white wave, across the field, screaming as they ran. Their voices
came up to the Princess on her tower, and she heard the words threaded
on their screams like beads on sharp needles: "The dragon, the dragon,
the dragon! Open the gates! The dragon is coming! The fiery dragon!"

And they swept across the field and into the gate of the town, and the
Princess heard the gate bang, and the children were out of sight--but on
the other side of the field the rose-thorns crackled and smashed in the
hedge, and something very large and glaring and horrible trampled the
ferns in the ditch for one moment before it hid itself again in the
covert of the wood.

The Princess went down and told her nurse, and the nurse at once locked
the great door of the tower and put the key in her pocket.

"Let them take care of themselves," she said, when the Princess begged
to be allowed to go out and help to take care of the children. "My
business is to take care of you, my precious, and I'm going to do it.
Old as I am, I can turn a key still."

So Sabrinetta went up again to the top of her tower, and cried whenever
she thought of the children and the fiery dragon. For she knew, of
course, that the gates of the town were not dragonproof, and that the
dragon could just walk in whenever he liked.

The children ran straight to the palace, where the Prince was cracking
his hunting whip down at the kennels, and told him what had happened.

"Good sport," said the Prince, and he ordered out his pack of
hippopotamuses at once. It was his custom to hunt big game with
hippopotamuses, and people would not have minded that so much--but he
would swagger about in the streets of the town with his pack yelping and
gamboling at his heels, and when he did that, the green-grocer, who had
his stall in the marketplace, always regretted it; and the crockery
merchant, who spread his wares on the pavement, was ruined for life
every time the Prince chose to show off his pack.

The Prince rode out of the town with his hippopotamuses trotting and
frisking behind him, and people got inside their houses as quickly as
they could when they heard