lose the cave door. "You can live here with me."

"I'm afraid I haven't made my meaning clear," said Edmund patiently.
"You see, my granny is in the town, and I can't bear to lose my granny
like this."

"I don't know what a granny may be," said the cockatrice, who seemed to
be growing weary of the subject, "but if it's a possession to which you
attach any importance----"

"Of course it is," said Edmund, losing patience at last. "Oh--do help
me. What can I do?"

"If I were you," said his friend, stretching itself out in the pool of
flame so that the waves covered him up to his chin, "I should find the
drakling and bring it here."

"But why?" said Edmund. He had gotten into the habit of asking why at
school, and the master had always found it trying. As for the
cockatrice, he was not going to stand that sort of thing for a moment.

"Oh, don't talk to me!" he said, splashing angrily in the flames. "I
give you advice; take it or leave it--I shan't bother about you anymore.
If you bring the drakling here to me, I'll tell you what to do next. If
not, not."

And the cockatrice drew the fire up close around his shoulders, tucked
himself up in it, and went to sleep.

Now this was exactly the right way to manage Edmund, only no one had
ever thought of trying to do it before.

He stood for a moment looking at the cockatrice; the cockatrice looked
at Edmund out of the corner of his eye and began to snore very loudly,
and Edmund understood, once and for all, that the cockatrice wasn't
going to put up with any nonsense. He respected the cockatrice very much
from that moment, and set off at once to do exactly as he was told--for
perhaps the first time in his life.

Though he had played truant so often, he knew one or two things that
perhaps you don't know, though you have always been so good and gone to
school regularly. For instance, he knew that a drakling is a dragon's
baby, and he felt sure that what he had to do was to find the third of
the three noises that people used to hear coming from the mountains. Of
course, the clucking had been the cockatrice, and the big noise like a
large gentleman asleep after dinner had been the big dragon. So the
smaller rumbling must have been the drakling.

He plunged boldly into the caves and searched and wandered and wandered
and searched, and at last he came to a third door in the mountain, and
on it was written THE BABY IS ASLEEP. Just before the door stood fifty
pairs of copper