Turning to Nurse Beaton, the Major whispered:—­

“Don’t worry him about this dream at all.  Leave it to me.  It’s wonderful.  Take him on your lap, Nurse, and—­er—­be ready.  It’s a very life-like picture, and I’m going to spring it on him without any remark—­but I’m more than a little anxious, I admit.  Still, it’s got to come, as I say, and better a picture first, with ourselves present.  If the picture don’t affect him I’ll show him a real one.  May be all right of course, but I don’t know.  I came across a somewhat similar case once before—­and it was not all right.  Not by any means,” and he disclosed the brilliantly coloured Animal Picture Book and knelt beside the expectant boy.

On the first page was an incredibly leonine lion, who appeared to have solved with much satisfaction the problem of aerial flight, so far was he from the mountain whence he had sprung and above the back of the antelope towards which he had propelled himself.  One could almost hear him roar.  There was menace and fate in eye and tooth and claw, yea, in the very kink of the prehensile-seeming tail wherewith he apparently steered his course in mid-air.  To gaze upon his impressive and determined countenance was to sympathize most fully with the sore-tried Prophet of old (known to Damocles as Dannle-in-the-lines-den) for ever more.

The boy was wholly charmed, stroked the glowing ferocity and observed that he was a pukka Bahadur.[7]

On the next page, burning bright, was a tiger, if possible one degree more terrible than the lion.  His “fearful cemetery” appeared to be full, judging by its burgeoned bulge and the shocking state of depletion exhibited by the buffalo on which he fed with barely inaudible snarls and grunts of satisfaction.  Blood dripped from his capacious and over-furnished mouth.

“Booful,” murmured Damocles.  “I shall go shooting tigerth to-mowwow.  Shoot vem in ve mouth, down ve froat, so as not to spoil ve wool.”

Turning over the page, the Major disclosed a most grievous grizzly bear, grizzly and bearish beyond conception, heraldic, regardant, expectant, not collared, fanged and clawed proper, rampant, erect, requiring no supporters.

“You could thtab him wiv a thword if you were quick, while he was doing that,” opined Damocles, charmed, enraptured, delighted.  One by one, other savage, fearsome beasts were disclosed to the increasingly delighted boy until, without warning, the Major suddenly turned a page and disclosed a brilliant and hungry-looking snake.

With a piercing shriek the boy leapt convulsively from Nurse Beaton’s arms, rushed blindly into the wall and endeavoured to butt and bore his way through it with his head, screaming like a wounded horse.  As the man and woman sprang to him he shrieked, “It’th under my foot!  It’th moving, moving, moving out” and fell to the ground in a fit.

Major John Decies arose from his bachelor dinner-table that evening, lit his “planter” cheroot, and strolled into the verandah that looked across a desert to a mountain range.