drawn up, and proceed to govern the country at
their ease, and with results: they would at once levy severer taxes,
and pick a quarrel with the most powerful of their neighbours.
Everything settled, they agreed to retire, and have a few hours' quiet
sleep first--all but the secretary, who was to sit up and call them at
the proper moment. Curdie allowed them half an hour to get to bed, and
then set about completing his purgation of the palace.

First he called Lina, and opened the door of the room where the
secretary sat. She crept in, and laid herself down against it. When
the secretary, rising to stretch his legs, caught sight of her eyes, he
stood frozen with terror. She made neither motion nor sound.
Gathering courage, and taking the thing for a spectral illusion, he
made a step forward. She showed her other teeth, with a growl neither
more than audible nor less than horrible. The secretary sank fainting
into a chair. He was not a brave man, and besides, his conscience had
gone over to the enemy, and was sitting against the door by Lina.

To the lord chamberlain's door next, Curdie conducted the legserpent,
and let him in.

Now His Lordship had had a bedstead made for himself, sweetly fashioned
of rods of silver gilt: upon it the legserpent found him asleep, and
under it he crept. But out he came on the other side, and crept over
it next, and again under it, and so over it, under it, over it, five or
six times, every time leaving a coil of himself behind him, until he
had softly folded all his length about the lord chamberlain and his
bed. This done, he set up his head, looking down with curved neck
right over His Lordship's, and began to hiss in his face.

He woke in terror unspeakable, and would have started up but the moment
he moved, the legserpent drew his coils closer, and closer still, and
drew and drew until the quaking traitor heard the joints of his
bedstead grinding and gnarring. Presently he persuaded himself that it
was only a horrid nightmare, and began to struggle with all his
strength to throw it off. Thereupon the legserpent gave his hooked
nose such a bite that his teeth met through it--but it was hardly
thicker than the bowl of a spoon; and then the vulture knew that he was
in the grasp of his enemy the snake, and yielded.

As soon as he was quiet the legserpent began to untwist and retwist, to
uncoil and recoil himself, swinging and swaying, knotting and relaxing
himself with strang