Princess:  Oh, does he ask to make a meal of me, after all?

Dragon:  I am hungry and dancing with the hunger!  It was you, Manus, stopped me from the one meal.  Let you set before me another.

King:  There is reason in that.  Drive up now for him a bullock from the meadow.

Dragon:  Manus, it is not bullocks I am craving, since the time you changed the heart within me for the heart of a little squirrel of the wood.

Manus:  (Taking a cocoa-nut from table.) Here is a nut from the island of Lanka, that is called Adam’s Paradise.  Milk there is in it, and a kernel as white as snow.

(He throws it out.  Dragon is heard crunching.)

Dragon:  (Putting head in again.) More!  Give me more of them!  Give them out to me by the dozen and by the score!

Manus:  You must go seek them in the east of the world, where you can gather them in bushels on the strand.

Dragon:  So I will go there!  I’ll make no delay!  I give you my word, I’d sooner one of them than to be cracking the skulls of kings’ daughters, and the blood running down my jaws.  Blood!  Ugh!  It would disgust me!  I’m in dread it would cause vomiting.  That and to have the plaits of hair tickling and tormenting my gullet!

Princess:  (Claps hands.) That is good hearing, and a great change of heart.

Dragon:  But if it’s a tame dragon I am from this out, I’m thinking it’s best for me to make away before you know it, or it’s likely you’ll be yoking me to harrow the clods, or to be dragging the water-car from the spring well.  So good-bye the whole of ye, and get to your supper.  Much good may it do you!  I give you my word there is nothing in the universe I despise, only the flesh-eaters of Adam’s race!

CURTAIN.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I wrote The Dragon in 1917, that now seems so many long years away, and I have been trying to remember how I came to write it.  I think perhaps through some unseen inevitable kick of the swing towards gay-coloured comedy from the shadow of tragedy.  It was begun seriously enough, for I see among my scraps of manuscripts that the earliest outline of it is entitled “The Awakening of a Soul,” the soul of the little Princess who had not gone “far out in the world.”  And that idea was never quite lost, for even when it had all turned to comedy I see as an alternative name “A Change of Heart.”  For even the Dragon’s heart is changed by force, as happens in the old folk tales and the heart of some innocent creature put in its place by the conqueror’s hand; all change more or less except the Queen.  She is yet satisfied that she has moved all things well, and so she must remain till some new breaking up or re-birth.