The Seven Dragons | Page 7

be a
general and a poet and a Prime Minister and an admiral and a civil
engineer. Meanwhile he was top of all his classes at school, and tip-top
of the geography class.
As for the Princess Mary Ann, she was a very good little girl, and
everyone loved her. She was always kind and polite, even to her Uncle
James and to other people whom she did not like very much; and
though she was not very clever, for a Princess, she always tried to do
her lessons. Even if you know perfectly well that you can't do your
lessons, you may as well try, and sometimes you find that by some
fortunate accident they really are done. Then the Princess had a truly
good heart: she was 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