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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.
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.
What are you going to do with me now?" "I do with you?" cried Beppo, astonished at so wild a possibility offering to come true. "I would like to get you out, of course but can I?" "I would like that dearly also!" said the Cockatrice. "But how can I?" inquired Beppo. "Keep me warm and feed me," re-turned the monster. "Presently I shall be able to find out where my tail is.
"I beg your pardon," said the drakling humbly, "but I am really very hungry." The cockatrice beckoned Edmund to the side of the basin and whispered in his ear so long and so earnestly that one side of the dear boy's hair was quite burnt off. And he never once interrupted the cockatrice to ask why.
The endogenous monster, indigenous to the Elysian Fields, is to the surrounding vegetation what the cockatrice is to the cock, the wyvern to the python. I should say 'was, for all the replants at Madeira and the Canaries are modern, and resemble only big toothsticks. But 'dragons' proper have existed, and perhaps memories of these portents long lingered in the brain of protohistoric man.
"Such," says Bacon, "was the end of this little cockatrice of a king." The Earl of Warwick was beheaded on Tower Hill, on the 28th of November 1499. King Sebastian of Portugal, who inherited the throne in 1557, seems, even from his infancy, to have exhibited a remarkable love of warlike exercises, and at an early age to have given promise of distinguishing himself as a warrior.
"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.
He guessed that it must have been the warmth which had waked the Cockatrice, so he made fires all down the side of the cave; wherever the great flank of the Cockatrice seemed to show, there he lighted a fire to put heat into the slumbering body of the beast. "Warm up, old fellow," he cried; "thaw out, I tell you! I want you to talk to me."
All the cave looked as green as grass when the eye of the Cockatrice lighted on it; and Beppo, seeing so mighty an optic turning its rays on him, felt all at once shrivelled and small, and very weak at the knees. "Oh, Cockatrice," he said, in a monstrous sad voice, "I hope I haven't hurt you!" "On the contrary," said the Cockatrice, "you have done me much good.
But he came again the next day for more stories, and the next day, and the next, for a long time. He told the boys at school about the cockatrice and his wonderful true tales, and the boys liked the stories; but when he told the master he was caned for untruthfulness. "But it's true," said Edmund. "Just you look where the fire burnt my hand."
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