ble enough to make hiding advisable.
Swarms of savage insects, to be sure, were giving him a hot
reception--mosquitoes of unimaginable size, and enormous stinging
flies which sought to deposit their eggs in his smooth hide, but with
his giraffe-like neck he could bite himself where he would, and the
lithe lash of his tail could flick off tormentors from any corner
of his anatomy.

Meanwhile, the excitement off-shore had died down. The harsh hootings
of the bird-lizards had ceased to rend the air as the dark wings
hurtled away to seek some remoter or less disturbed hunting-ground.
Then across the silence came suddenly a terrific crashing of branches,
mixed with gasping cries. Startled, the diplodocus hoisted himself
upon his hind-quarters, till he sat up like a kangaroo, supported and
steadied by the base of his huge tail. In this position his head,
forty feet above the earth, overlooked the tops of all but the tallest
trees. And what he saw brought the look of anxiety once more into his
round, saucer-eyes.

Hurling itself with desperate, plunging leaps through the rank
growths, and snapping the trunks of the brittle tree-ferns in its path
as if they had been cauliflowers, came a creature not unlike himself,
but of less than half the size, and with neck and tail of only
moderate length. This creature was fleeing in frantic terror from
another and much smaller being, which came leaping after it like a
giant kangaroo. Both were plainly dinosaurs, with the lizard tail and
hind-legs; but the lesser of the two, with its square, powerful head
and tiger-fanged jaws, and the tremendous, rending claws on its short
forearms, was plainly of a different species from the great
herb-eaters of the dinosaurian family. It was one of the smaller
members of that terrible family of carnivorous dinosaurians which
ruled the ancient cycad forests as the black-maned lion rules the
Rhodesian jungles to-day. The massive iguanodon which fled before it
so madly, though of fully thrice its bulk, had reason to fear it as
the fat cow fears a wolf.

A moment more, and the dreadful chase, with a noise of raucous groans
and pantings, burst forth into the open, not fifty feet from where the
colossus stood watching. Almost at the watcher's feet the fugitive was
overtaken. With a horrid leap and a hoot of triumph, the pursuer
sprang upon its neck and bore it to the ground, where it lay bellowing
hoarsely and striking out blunderingly with the massive, h