"A tin lunch-pail," I finally reply.
"With luncheon in?" asks Mary.
"Empty," I say.
So we start.
I have already said that Lagunita is a pretty little lake. It lies
just under the first of the foothills that rise ridge after ridge into
the forested mountains that separate us from the ocean. Indeed, it is
on the first low step up from the valley floor, and from its enclosing
bank or shore one gets a good view of the level, reaching valley
thickly set with live-oak trees and houses and fields. Around the
little lake have grown up pines, willows and other beautiful trees,
and at one side a tiny stream comes in during the wet season. There is
no regular outlet, but the water which usually begins to come in about
November keeps filling the shallow bowl of the lake higher and higher
until by spring it is nearly bank full and may even overflow. Then as
the long dry summer season sets in, the level of the water grows
lower and lower until in August or September there is only left a
small muddy puddle crammed with surprised and despairing little fishes
and salamanders and water-beetles and the like, who are not at all
accustomed to such behavior on the part of a lake. And then a few days
later they are all gasping their last breaths there together on the
scum-covered, waterless bottom.
But when Lagunita is really a lake, it is a very pretty one, and Mary
and I love to go there and sit on the bank under the willows near the
horse paddocks and watch the college boys rowing about in their
graceful, narrow, long-oared shells. These swift-darting boats look
like great water-skaters, only white instead of black. You know the
long-legged, active water-skaters or water-striders that skim about
over the surface of ponds or quiet backwater pools in streams in
summer time?
So Mary and I went to Lagunita with our rake and tin lunch-pail to
hunt for dragons. No shining armor; no great two-handed sword; no cap
of invisibility. Just a rake and a tin lunch-pail.
"Where, Mary, do you think is the likeliest place for the dragon?" I
ask.
Mary answers promptly, "There at the foot of the steep stony bank
where the big willow-tree hangs over."
We go there. I grasp my rake firmly with both hands. I reach far out
over the shallow water. Then I beat the rake suddenly down through the
water to the bottom, and with a quick strong pull I drag it out,
raking out with it a great mass of oozy mud and matted leaves. I drag
this well up on shore, and both Mary and I flop down on our knees and
begin pawing about in it. Suddenly Mary calls out, "I've got one," and
holds up in her fingers an extraordinary, kicking, twisting creature
with six legs, a big head, and a thick, ugly body on which seem to be
the beginnings of several fins or wings. It has, this creature, two
great staring eyes, and stout, sharp-pointed spines stick out from
various parts of the body.
"Put him in the lunch-pail," I shout. I had already filled it
half-full of water from the lake.
Then I found one; then Mary another, and then I still another. It was
truly great sport, this dragon-hunting.
We put them all into the lunch-pail where they lay sullenly on the
bottom, glaring at each other, but not offering to fight, as we rather
hoped they would.
Then, what to do? These dragons in their regular lairs at the bottom
of Lagunita might do a lot of most interesting things, but dredged up
in this summary way and deposited in a strange tin pail in the glaring
light of day, they seemed wholly indisposed to carry on any
performances of dragon for our benefit. So we decided to take them
home, and try to fix up for them a still smaller lakelet than
Lagunita; one, say, in a tub! Then, perhaps, they would feel more at
home and ease, and might do something for us.
So we took them home. And we fixed a tub with sand in the bottom,
water over that, and over the top of the tub a screen of netting that
would let air and sunlight in, but not dragons out. Then we collected
some miscellaneous small water-beasties and a few water-plants, and
put them in, and so really had a very comfortable and home-like place
for the dragons. They seemed to take to it all right; we called our
new lakelet Monday Pond, because of some relation between the tub and
washday, I suppose, and we had very good fun with our dragons for
several weeks. Think of the advantage of having your dragon right at
home! If it is a bad day, or we are lazy, or there may be visitors who
stay too long so there is only a little time for ourselves, how
convenient it is to have a dragon--or indeed a whole brood of
dragons--right in your study. Much better, of course, than to have to
sail to a distant island and tramp through leagues of forest or thorny
bushes or over burning desert or among spouting volcanoes to find your
dragon, as most princes in fairy stories have to do.
I can't, of course, venture to tell you of all the interesting things
that Mary and I saw our dragons do. Two or three will have to do. Or
my publisher will cry, "Cut it short; cut it short, I say." And that
will hurt me, for he is really a most forbearing publisher, and quite
in the way of a friend. The three things shall be, one, eating, and
what with; two, getting a new skin, and why; and third, changing from
an under-water, crawling, squirmy, ugly dragon into an aerial,
whizzing, flashing, dashing, beautiful-winged dragon, and when. Of
course one of the most important things about any dragon is what and
how he eats; and the other most important thing about Mary's and my
special kind of dragon is his remarkable change. This was to us much
more remarkable than having three heads or even getting a new head
every time an old one is cut off, which seems to be rather a usual
habit of fairy-book dragons.
The dragons lay rather quietly on the sand at the bottom of Monday
Pond most of the time. Sometimes one would be up a little way on the
shore, that is, the side of the tub, or clinging to one of the
plant-stems. When poked with a pencil,--and we were fearless about
poking them, if the pencil were a long one,--they would half-walk,
half-swim away. But mostly they lay pretty well concealed, waiting for
something to happen. What would happen occasionally was this: a young
May-fly or a water-beetle would come swimming or walking along; if it
passed an inch away from the dragon, all right; but if its path
brought it closer, an extraordinary "catcher," rather like a pair of
long nippers or tongs, would shoot out like a flash from the head of
the dragon and seize on the unfortunate beastie. Then the "catcher"
would fold up in such a way as to bring the victim against the
dragon's mouth, which is provided with powerful, sharp-toothed jaws.
These jaws then had their turn. And that was the end of the May-fly.
Mary was rather shocked when she saw the dragon first use its
"catcher." She wanted to rescue the poor May-fly. But after all she
has got pretty well used to seeing tragedies in insect life. They seem
to be necessary and normal. Many insects depend upon other animals for
food, just as we do. Only fortunately we don't have to catch and kill
our own steer or pig or lamb or chicken. We turn the bloody business
over to men who like--well, at least, who do it for us. But in the
world of lower animals each one is usually his own butcher.
Mary soon wanted to see the dragon's "catcher," and so we dredged one
out of Monday Pond, and put him on the study-table. As he faced us
with his big eyes glaring from his broad heavy head, he looked very
fierce. But curiously enough, he didn't seem to have any jaws; nor
even a mouth. The whole front of his face was smooth and covered over
by a sort of mask, so that his terrible jaws and catching nippers were
invisible. However, we soon understood this. The mask was the
folded-up "catcher" so disposed that it served, when not in use,
actually to hide its own iniquity as well as that of the yawning mouth
behind. Only when some small insect, all unsuspecting this smooth
masked face, comes close, do the long tongs unfold, shoot out, and
reveal the waiting jaws and thirsty throat. A veritable dragon indeed;
sly and cruel and ever hungry for living prey.
One day when we were looking into Monday Pond, Mary saw a curious
object that looked more like a hollow dragon than anything else. It
had all the shape and size of one of the dragons; the legs and eyes
and masked face, the pads on the back that looked like half-fledged
wings. But there was a transparency and emptiness about it that was
uncanny and ghost-like. Then, too, when we looked more closely there
was a great rent down the back. And that made the mystery plain. The
real dragon, the flesh and blood and breathing live dragon, had come
out of that long tear, leaving his skin behind! It was his complete
skin, too, back and sides and belly, out to the tips of his feelers
and down to his toes and claws.
"But why should he shed his skin? Hasn't he any skin now?" asked Mary.
"Of course he must have a skin. How could he keep his blood in, and
what would his muscles be fastened to, for he is a boneless dragon,
and his skeleton is his outside shell, with his muscles fastened to
it? So how could he live at all without a skin? He must have a new
skin."
And, of course, that was exactly it. He had cast his old skin, as a
snake does, and had got a brand-new one. Why shouldn't a dragon change
his skin if a snake can?
But Mary is persistent about her "whys," and I was quite ready for her
next question, which came after a moment of musing.
"Why should he shed his old skin and get a new one? Is the new one
different; a different color or shape or something?"
"No; not a different color or different shape especially, but a
different size. The dragon is growing up. He is like a boy who keeps
on wearing age-nine clothes until they are too short in the sleeves,
too tight in the back, and too high-water in the legs. Then one day
he sheds his age-nine suit and gets an age-eleven one. See?"
"What a funny professor you are! Is that the way you lecture to your
classes?"
"Gracious, no, Mary! This is the way: As the immature dragon grows
older, his constant assimilation of food tends to create a natural
increase in size. But the comparative inelasticity of his chitinized
cuticula prevents the actual expansion, to any considerable degree, of
his body mass. Thus all the cells of the body become turgid, and
altogether a great pressure is exerted outwards against the enclosing
cuticular wall. This wall then suddenly splits along the longimesial
line of the dorsum, and through this rent the dragon extricates itself
in soft and defenceless condition, but of markedly larger size. The
new cuticula, which is pale, elastic and thin at first, soon becomes
thicker, strongly chitinized and dark. The old cuticle, or exuvia,
which has been moulted, is curiously complete, and is a hollow or
shell-like replica of the external appearance of the dragon even to
the finest details. How is that, Mary?"
"Very instruct--instructing"--with an effort--"indeed," replies Mary,
with grave face. "But I guess I understand the change from age-nine to
age-eleven clothes better."
And then we saw the third wonderful happening in our dragon's life
that I said we should tell about. We saw one of the dragons getting
wings! That is, changing from an ugly, blackish, squat, crawling
creature into a glorious long-bodied, rainbow-tinted, flying dragon.
Another dragon had crawled up above the water on a plant-stem and was
also "moulting its chitinized cuticula." But it was coming out from
the old skin in very different shape and color. I had forgotten, when
I told Mary that they only changed in size after casting the skin,
about the last moulting. Each dragon casts its skin several times in
its life, but the last time it does it, it makes the wonderful change
I've already spoken about, from crawling to flying dragon. And it was
one of these last skin-castings that was going on now under our very
eyes.
I can't describe all that happened. You must see it for yourself some
time. How, out of the great rent in the old skin along the back, the
soft damp body of the dragon squeezes slowly out, with its constant
revelation of delicate changing color and its graceful new shape; how
out of the odd shapeless pads on the back come four, long, narrow,
shining, transparent wings, with complex framework of fine little
veins, or ribs, and thin flexible glassy membrane stretched over them;
how the new head looks with its enormous, sparkling, iridescent eyes
making nearly two-thirds of it and so cleverly fitted on the body that
it can turn nearly entirely around on the neck. And then how the body
fills out and takes shape, and the wings get larger and larger, and
everything more and more beautifully colored! All this you will have
to see for yourself some time when you have a Monday Pond in your own
study, with a brood of dragons in.
"It _is_ wonderful, isn't it, Mary? How would you like to see twenty,
thirty, forty, oh, a hundred dragons doing this all at once. We can if
we want to. All we have to do is to go over to Lagunita some morning
early, very early, just a little after sunrise--for that is their
favorite time--and we shall see scores of dragons crawling up out of
the water on stones, plants, sticks, anything convenient, and
sloughing off their dirty, dark, old skins and coming out in their
beautiful iridescent green and violet and purple new skins, with their
long slender body and great flashing wings. They sit quietly on the
stones and plant-stems until the warm rising sun dries them and their
new skins get firm and all nicely fitted, and then they begin their
new life,--wheeling and dashing over the lake and among the hills and
bushes and above the grasses and grain along the banks. Like eagles
and hawks they are seeking their prey. Watch that little gnat buzzing
there in the air. A flying dragon swoops by and there is no gnat there
any longer. It has been caught in the curious basket-like trap which
the dragon makes with its spiny legs all held together, and it is
being crushed and chewed by the great jaws. Still a dragon, you see,
for all of its new beauty!"
Mary muses. "Not all beautiful things in the world are good, are
they?" she murmurs.
"Mary, you are a philosopher," I say.
* * * * *
As I read this over I realize quite as keenly, I hope, as you do, my
reader, how little there is in this story. And yet finding out this
little was real pleasure to Mary and me. Now we must perforce
estimate the pleasures and pains, the likes and dislikes, of other
people by our own. And however untrue this estimate may be for any one
other person, it must be fairly true for any considerable number of
persons. Therefore--and this is the reason for putting down our simple
experiences with the insects for other people to read and perhaps to
be stirred by to see and do similar things--therefore, I say, other
people, some other people, also must be able to get pleasure from what
we do.
Now if there is any way and any means of getting clean pleasure into
the crowded days of our living, then that way and means should be
suggested and opened to as many as possible. Mary and I, you see, have
the real proselyting spirit; we are missionaries of the religion of
the unroofed temples. And we want all to be saved! So we give
testimony willingly of our own experiences, and of the saving grace of
our belief. We have no names for our idols, nor any formulation of
our creed. But in various voice and word we do gladly confess over and
over again the reality of the happiness that comes to us from our
hours with the lowly world that we are coming to know better and
better. And any one of these happy hours may contain no more than the
little that has been told in this story of the "Dragon of Lagunita,"
and yet be really and truly a happy hour.
[Illustration: A SUMMER INVASION]