yed to lunch,
and he and the doctor quarreled very happily all the afternoon about the
name and the family of the thing that had come out of Effie's eye.

But at teatime another thing happened. Effie's brother Harry fished
something out of his tea, which he thought at first was an earwig. He
was just getting ready to drop it on the floor, and end its life in the
usual way, when it shook itself in the spoon--spread two wet wings, and
flopped onto the tablecloth. There it sat, stroking itself with its feet
and stretching its wings, and Harry said: "Why, it's a tiny newt!"

The professor leaned forward before the doctor could say a word. "I'll
give you half a crown for it, Harry, my lad," he said, speaking very
fast; and then he picked it up carefully on his handkerchief.

"It is a new specimen," he said, "and finer than yours, Doctor."

It was a tiny lizard, about half an inch long--with scales and wings.

So now the doctor and the professor each had a specimen, and they were
both very pleased. But before long these specimens began to seem less
valuable. For the next morning, when the knife-boy was cleaning the
doctor's boots, he suddenly dropped the brushes and the boot and the
blacking, and screamed out that he was burnt.

And from inside the boot came crawling a lizard as big as a kitten, with
large, shiny wings.

"Why," said Effie, "I know what it is. It is a dragon like the one St.
George killed."

And Effie was right. That afternoon Towser was bitten in the garden by a
dragon about the size of a rabbit, which he had tried to chase, and the
next morning all the papers were full of the wonderful "winged lizards"
that were appearing all over the country. The papers would not call them
dragons, because, of course, no one believes in dragons nowadays--and at
any rate the papers were not going to be so silly as to believe in fairy
stories. At first there were only a few, but in a week or two the
country was simply running alive with dragons of all sizes, and in the
air you could sometimes see them as thick as a swarm of bees. They all
looked alike except as to size. They were green with scales, and they
had four legs and a long tail and great wings like bats' wings, only the
wings were a pale, half-transparent yellow, like the gear-boxes on
bicycles.

They breathed fire and smoke, as all proper dragons must, but still the
newspapers went on pretending they were lizards, until the editor of the
_Standard_ was pic