“Then a strange thing happened. Suddenly, without any warning, a monstrous boy’s kite, with a long tail and wings twenty feet across, came flapping over the palm-tops. It was followed by another, and it struck me, on second thoughts, that they were umbrellas. A discovery of such a nature, even in a dream, caused me some astonishment. I could not instantly understand how such concerns should thus promiscuously whirl about in Mesozoic air, and I wondered who had lost them; but an instant later the truth came to me. These flutterers were no umbrellas at all, merely a brace of particularly fine Pterodactyls. Taking my chance, I raised my trusty Remington and fired. Seeing that I have never been known to handle firearms in my life, you will judge of my satisfaction when I tell you that I managed to wing the largest. It fell headlong, and Peter, with considerable lack of judgment, went to retrieve it. The faithful little beast nearly perished in the attempt. Your winged Pterodactyl, with twenty feet of flapping pinion, hundreds of sharp teeth, and a love for life quite prehistoric in its intensity, is a difficult matter to retrieve. I say unhesitatingly that fossil remains give no idea whatever of the ferocity of these flying dragons. Mortally wounded though he was, the animal showed a strong inclination to kill both me and Peter. I loaded again, therefore, and shot that Pterodactyl in the eye. Whereupon he gathered his vast wings trembling about him, and buried his head in them and so died. I marked the spot that I might pick him up on the way home. What my idea of ‘home’ may have been I cannot, of course, explain. Perhaps I thought I was putting up at a hydropathic Mesozoic hotel somewhere at hand, ‘in a fine volcanic neighbourhood, with splendid sea-bathing, Pterodactyl shooting and lawn-tennis. Terms moderate.’ “The aspect of my first victim set me thinking. It struck me, if creatures of such size flew in the air, that the solid earth might be supporting things a good deal larger. I was, of course, aware that Deinosaurs must be about. I knew that the fine specimens sometimes stood nearly twenty feet high, that many of them walked on their hind legs, and that, though certain varieties confined themselves to vegetable diet, others were carnivorous, and would as soon lunch off an Archdeacon as anything. I trembled, too, for my Peter. I feared at every step he would do something rash and lose his life. For my own part I determined to allow no Quixotic notions of what was and what was not sportsmanlike to interfere with my safety. To show what I mean, I may say that my next bag was a Teleosaurus; and I shot him sleeping by the river. His back was turned, his eyes were shut, so that I was enabled to destroy him without the smallest difficulty. He proved to be a crocodilian trifle about twenty feet long; and he died, as it were, smiling. It struck me that this monster might work up into neat cigar-cases for friends.