Here outside the forest there was weather again, and the weather was more promising than generous.  It continued to promise all day without exactly explaining what its promise was, and without achieving any special fulfilment.  Fine silver lines of sunlight were ruled at a steep angle across a grey slate view.

At the gate of Higgins Farm, Sarah Brown was a little disconcerted to find a small dragon.  It was coiled round a tree beside the clipped box archway.  It was not a very fine specimen, being of a brownish-green colour, and having lost the tip of one wing.  Its spine was serrated, especially deeply between its shoulder blades, where it could raise a sort of crest if angered or excited.  But at present it was asleep, its saturnine and rather wistful face rested upon one scaly paw.

Sarah Brown was uncertain what to do, but the Dog David took the matter into his own paws by mistake.  He had just met one of the castle dogs, one of those tremulous-tailed creatures who spend themselves in a rather pathetic effort to sustain an imaginary reputation for humour.  David retorted to this dog’s first facetious onslaught with a kindly quip, they trod on each other once or twice with extravagant gestures, and then parted hysterically, each supposing himself to be pursued by the other.  It was then that David tripped over the dragon’s barbed tail.  David squeaked, and the dragon awoke.  It uncoiled itself suddenly like a broken spring.

“Gosh,” it said.  “Asleep again!  I was waiting for you, and the sun on my back always makes me sleepy.  I am the foreman.  Higgins telephoned that you were coming.”

It preceded her through the little green archway that led to the farm.  The sight reminded Sarah Brown of watching from Golders Green Tube Station the train one has just missed dive into the tunnel.  She followed.

On the other side of the archway the whole view of the plain called Higgins Farm met the adventurer.  The farm-buildings were heaped graciously together on a little wave in the sea of ploughed fields.  Except for two pale ricks in their midst, they exactly matched their surroundings, they were plastered dark red, and thatched with very old green and brown thatch.  Beyond the buildings was a little wood, its interior lighted up with bluebells, and this wood merged into an orchard, where a white pony and an auburn pig strove apparently to eat the same blade of grass.  The various sections of the farm land lay mapped out in different intensities of brown, very young green, and maturer green, and each section was dotted with people.  They seemed small people even from a distance, and, as Sarah Brown advanced at the tail of the dragon, she saw that the workers were all indeed under ordinary human size.  The tallest, a man guiding a miniature plough behind a tall horse, might have reached Sarah Brown’s shoulder.  None of them seemed hard at work, they stood talking in little groups.  One group as they passed it was trafficking in cigarette cards.  “I want to get my Gold Scale set of English Kings complete,” a voice was saying tragically.  “Has nobody got Edward the Confessor?” None of them took any notice of the foreman.