"That monster will be the death of me yet. I know that Le Gargouille never looked like that. He was a great dragon, you know, who lived in the Seine and ravaged the country until he was destroyed by Saint Romaine. They do not infest our rivers any more--they have taken to the church. My faith, if I knew where to find one I would lead that stupid monk down there by the ear and show him what a dragon is like. I never saw a dragon--it is not my business to paint dragons--but I know that they ought to be slippery shining green like a frog, or a lizard--and I cannot get the color." "Is this anything like?" asked Padraig, and he held up the book. Padraig's mind worked by leaps, Brother Basil used to say, and it had made a jump while the artist was talking. The most that he had thought of, when he made the sketch in his book, was that the face of the Sub-Prior would be a good one to use some day for a certain kind of character; and then it had occurred to him to fancy the dragon showing his appreciation of the dignitary in a natural way. He had already done the dragon with the last of the green that he and Brother Basil brought from Ireland, before he came to France, and it was a clear transparent brilliant color that looked like a new-born water-plant leaf in the sun. He had watched lizards and frogs, in long dreamy afternoons by the fishing-pools, too many times not to remember. The painter's mobile dark face changed to half a dozen expressions in a minute. He chuckled over the caricature; then he looked at the work more closely; then he fluttered over the other leaves of the book. "Where did you get the color for this?" he queried. "I made it," said Padraig. "Can you make it again?" Padraig hesitated. "Is there a forest near by?" "Forest--no; but why? For the hunting of dragons?" "N-no, b-but--" Padraig was apt to stammer when excited--"if I had balsam like ours I could make the green. We had none, and so we hunted until we found the right resin--Brother Basil and I." "Basil Ossorin, an Irish monk from England?" asked Matteo quickly. "I met him ten years since when he was on his way to Byzantium. If he was your master you have had good teaching." Padraig nodded. Brother Basil was the man whom he best loved. "There is no trouble about the balsam if you know it when you see it," the artist went on. "I will take you to a place where anything may be bought--cobalt, lapis lazuli, cinnabar, orpiment, sandarac--and it is honestly sold." Padraig numbered the matters off on his fingers. "Copper,--and Venice turpentine,--and saffron, to make him yellow underneath like water-snakes in an old pond. His wings must be smooth--and green--bright, and mottled with rusty brown--the sun comes from behind, and he must look as if it were shining through the halo round the maiden's head." "I wonder now about that balsam," mused the painter. Padraig drew an outline in the dust on the stone flags. "The tree is like this--the leaf and berry like this."