The Seven Dragons | Page 7

always kind to her pets. She never slapped her hippopotamus when it broke her dolls in its playful gambols, and she never forgot to feed her rhinoceroses in their little hutch in the back yard. Her elephant was devoted to her, and sometimes Mary Ann made her nurse quite cross by smuggling the dear little thing up to bed with her and letting it go to sleep with its long trunk laid lovingly across her throat, and its pretty head cuddled under the Royal right ear.
When the Princess had been good all through the week--for, like all real, live, nice children, she was sometimes naughty, but never bad--nurse would allow her to ask her little friends to come on Wednesday morning early and spend the day, because Wednesday is the end of the week in that country. Then, in the afternoon, when all the little dukes and duchesses and marquises and countesses had finished their rice-pudding, and had had their hands and faces washed after it, nurse would say:-
"Now, my dears, what would you like to do this afternoon?" just as if she didn't know. And the answer would be always the same:
"Oh, do let's go to the Zoological Gardens and ride on the big guinea-pig and feed the rabbits and hear the dormouse asleep."
So their pinafores were taken off and they all went to the Zoological Gardens--where twenty of them could ride at a time on the guinea-pig, and where even the little ones could feed the great rabbits if some grown-up person were kind enough to lift them up for the purpose. And there always was some such person, because in Rotundia everybody was kind--except one.
Now that you have read as far as this you know, of course, that the Kingdom of Rotundia was a very remarkable place; and if you are a thoughtful child--as of course you are--you will not need me to tell you what was the most remarkable thing about it. But in case you are not a thoughtful child--and it is just possible of course that you are not--I will tell you at once what that most remarkable thing was. All the animals were the wrong sizes! And this was how it happened.
In old, old, olden times, when all our world was just loose; earth and air and fire and water mixed up anyhow like a pudding, and spinning round like mad trying to get the different things to settle into their proper places, a round piece of earth got loose and went spinning away by itself across the water which was just beginning to try to get spread out smooth into a real sea. And as the great round piece of earth flew away, going round and round as hard as it could, it met a long piece of hard rock that had got loose from another part of the puddingy mixture, and the rock was so hard, and was going so fast, that it ran its point through the round piece of earth and stuck out on the other side of it, so that the two together were like a very-very-much-too-big teetotum.
I am afraid all this is very dull, but you know geography is never quite lively, and after all I must give you a little information even in a fairy tale--like the powder in jam.
Well, when the pointed rock smashed into the round bit of earth the shock was so great that it set them spinning together through the air--which was just getting into its proper place, like all the rest of the things--only, as luck would have it, they forgot which way round they had been going, and began to spin round the wrong way. Presently Centre of Gravity--a great giant who was managing the whole business--woke up in the middle of the earth and began to grumble.
"Hurry up" he said; "come down and lie still, can't you?"
So the rock with the round piece of earth fell into the sea, and the point of the rock went into a hole that just fitted it in the stony sea-bottom, and there it spun round the wrong way seven times and then lay still. And that round piece of land became, after millions of years, the Kingdom of Rotundia.
This is the end of the geography lesson. And now for just a little natural history, so that we may not feel that we are quite wasting our time. Of course, the consequence of the island having spun round the wrong way was that when the animals began to grow on the island they all grew the wrong sizes. The guinea-pig, as you know, was as big as our elephants, and the elephant--dear little pet--was the size of the silly, tiny, black-and-tan dogs that ladies carry sometimes in their muffs. The rabbits were about