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gardeners; so when the big beasts grew small, he grew small with the other beasts, and the little purple dragon, when he fell at the Princess’s feet, saw there a very small magician named Uncle James. And the dragon took him because it wanted a birthday present.
    So now all the animals were new sizes—and at first it seemed very strange to everyone to have great lumbering elephants and a tiny little dormouse, but they have got used to it now, and think no more of it than we do.
    All this happened several years ago, and the other day I saw in “The Rotundia Times” an account of the wedding of the Princess with Lord Thomas Gardener, K.C.D., and I knew she could not have married anyone but Tom, so I supposethey made him a Lord on purpose for the wedding—and K.C.D., of course, means Clever Conqueror of the Dragon. If you think that is wrong it is only because you don’t know how they spell in Rotundia. The paper said that among the beautiful presents of the bridegroom to the bride was an enormous elephant, on which the bridal pair made their wedding tour. This must have been Fido. You remember Tom promised to give him back to the Princess when they were married. “The Rotundia Times” called the married couple “the happy pair.” It was clever of the paper to think of calling them that—it is such a pretty and novel expression, and I think it is truer than many of the things you see in papers.
    Because, you see, the Princess and the gardener’s son were so fond of each other they could not help being happy—and besides, they had an elephant of their very own to ride on. If that is not enough to make people happy, I should like to know what is. Though, of course, I know there are some people who could not be happy unless they had a whale to sail on, and perhaps not even then. But they are greedy, grasping people, the kind who would take four helpings of pudding, as likely as not, which neither Tom nor Mary Ann ever did.

THE DELIVERERS OF THEIR COUNTRY
    I
t all began with Effie’s getting something in her eye. It hurt very much indeed, and it felt something like a red-hot spark—only it seemed to have legs as well, and wings like a fly. Effie rubbed and cried—not real crying, but the kind your eye does all by itself without your being miserable inside your mind—and then she went to her father to have the thing in her eye taken out. Effie’s father was a doctor, so of course he knew how to take things out of eyes—he did it very cleverly with a soft paintbrush dipped in castor-oil. When he had got the thing out, he said:
    “This is very curious.” Effie had often got things in her eye before, and her father had always seemed to think it was natural—rather tiresome and naughty perhaps, but stillnatural. He had never before thought it curious. She stood holding her handkerchief to her eye, and said:
    “I don’t believe it’s out.” People always say this when they have had something in their eyes.
    “Oh, yes—it’s
out,”
said the doctor—“here it is on the brush. This is very interesting.”
    Effie had never heard her father say that about anything that she had any share in. She said
“What?”
    The doctor carried the brush very carefully across the room, and held the point of it under his microscope—then he twisted the brass screws of the microscope, and looked through the top with one eye.
    “Dear me,” he said. “Dear,
dear
me! Four well-developed limbs; a long caudal appendage; five toes, unequal in lengths, almost like one of the Lacertidæ, yet there are traces of wings.” The creature under his eye wriggled a little in the castor-oil, and he went on: “Yes; a bat-like wing. A new specimen, undoubtedly. Effie, run round to the professor and ask him to be kind enough to step in for a few minutes.”
    “You might give me sixpence, daddy,” said Effie, “because I did bring you the new specimen. I took great care of it inside my eye; and my eye
does
hurt.”
    The doctor was so