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Updated: June 26, 2025
"Oh, master!" wailed the Cockatrice; "mayn't I? For the first time this thousand years I have felt young again." Beppo was pale and trembling with agitation over the fearful effects of that first tail-wagging. "You mustn't feel young!" said he. "Why not?" asked the Cockatrice, with a piteous wail. "There isn't room in the world for a Cockatrice to feel young nowadays," answered Beppo gravely.
"But what can I do for you?" said the creature. "Tell me stories," said Edmund. "What about?" said the cockatrice. "About true things that they don't know at school," said Edmund.
For our places are seized now by dogs, now by hawks, now by that biped beast whose cohabitation with the clergy was forbidden of old, from which we have always taught our nurslings to flee more than from the asp and the cockatrice; wherefore she, always jealous of the love of us, and never to be appeased, at length seeing us in some corner protected only by the web of some dead spider, with a frown abuses and reviles us with bitter words, declaring us alone of all the furniture in the house to be unnecessary, and complaining that we are useless for any household purpose, and advises that we should speedily be converted into rich caps, sendal and silk and twice-dyed purple, robes and furs, wool and linen: and, indeed, not without reason, if she could see our inmost hearts, if she had listened to our secret counsels, if she had read the book of Theophrastus or Valerius, or only heard the twenty-fifth chapter of Ecclesiasticus with understanding ears.
Edmund very nearly said "Why?" but he stopped in time, and instead, said: "She won't hear me " "Oh, very well," said the cockatrice. "No doubt you know best," and he began to tuck himself up again in the fire, so Edmund did as he was bid. And when he began to laugh his laughter echoed in the mouth of the cave till it sounded like the laughter of a whole castleful of giants.
Fortune, the sunderer, hath wrought the severance of our loves; Yet doth our enemies' despite against us nought abate. A filthy cockatrice is set to torture me with whips, Whose breast against me is fulfilled with rancour and with hate. But haply God shall yet reknit our severed loves again And turn our enemies from us with vengeance stern and strait.
"Hurry, hurry, or we shan't get through before the young cockatrice comes back to catch us at work! She has got the eye of a hawk, I can tell you," cried the woman, emptying her pitcher into the jar, which was carried away to a safe corner by her accomplice. "Come, bring the water and fill up after me. There is twenty beds left yet.
One day? why, it's not an hour Man and horse? why, 'tis a monkey on a starved cat!" "Father wad hae come himsell," said Davie, "on the muckle red mear, an ye wad hae bidden till the morn's night." "Four-and-twenty hours after the regular date of delivery! You little cockatrice egg, do you understand the art of imposition so early?"
"I beg your pardon," it said at last, "but I am always accustomed to having a little basin of fire as soon as I get up, and I feel rather faint. Might I?" It reached out a claw toward the cockatrice's basin. "Certainly not," said the cockatrice sharply. "Where were you brought up? Did they never teach you that 'we must not ask for all we see'? Eh?"
Her voice is the screeching of an owl, her eye the poison of a cockatrice, her hand the claw of a crocodile, and her heart a cabinet of horror. She is the grief of nature, the wound of wit, the trouble of reason, and the abuse of time. Her pride is unsupportable, her anger unquenchable, her will unsatiable, and her malice unmatchable.
It would beg the question to say that this would in itself have been undesirable; but the practical effect of it, as the world then stood, would have only been to make the educated into infidels, and to leave the multitude to a convenient but debasing superstition. The monks said that Erasmus laid the egg, and Luther hatched a cockatrice.
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