“We don’t. We could be lost any time,” said Pat.
“You might have been once, but not after this. There’s a whole Royal
Family right before your eyes now: Queen Cassiopeia on her throne and
King Cepheus beside her and their pretty daughter, Andromeda.—That is
one of Cepheus’ stars—and there’s another.” The Princess drew lines with
her finger from the stars of the big “W” to the ones they wanted to
find. And the Others picked them out, passing from star to star like
crossing a brook, jumping from stone to stone. There were different
colors, too, to help them. The Princess saw them plainly,—red stars and
blue and yellow, and never before had the Others seen anything but all
alike and plain shining. At first they believed it only because the
Princess said so; then they began to see it themselves, but it was still
too light to see very well. And they found a few stars of Andromeda.
“There is a beautiful young hero who belongs with them,” said the
Princess. “He’s down below the treetops now; he will come up later. He
is Perseus,—the Rescuer. He helped the Cassiopeia family out of terrible
trouble when they were all Earth People.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Phyllisy. “Perseus-and-the-Gorgon?”
“No less. A friend of yours, Miss Phyllisy?”
Miss Phyllisy nodded, and Pat twisted her eyebrow.
“Well,—she’s eleven and nine months, and I’m only nine and seven
months,” she said, just as if she were arguing something.
“I only happened to, Pat,” said Phyllisy.
“She’ll tell you some time; then you’ll know him too,” said the
Princess. “I want to show you somebody splendid. Tip your heads up. Do
you see four stars that make a long diamond,—three brighter and one not
so bright at the point? That’s Draco’s head,—the great Dragon. See his
spiky wings lifted. His tail comes down this way. Look,—a curl,—so.” She
swung her finger around. “Isn’t he fine? Keep your eye right on him and
I’ll tell you who he is. He isn’t one of your common, everyday dragons
you meet so often.—Is your eye on him, Pat?”
Pat tipped her head up, then she tipped it down and nodded. The Princess
squeezed the young Other One, who was sleepy, in the hollow of her arm,
and began in a story-telling voice: “There was once a young man named
Jason, who had a great many adventures. One of them was when he set out
to bring home the fleece of a ram. (A ram is a grown-up lamb, Kitten.”
The Kitten made a funny little bleating noise, like a mother-cat; but
she was only partly awake.) “And this was a golden fleece. And it hung
on a tree all-by-alone, where any one might have stolen it,—ONLY, it was
guarded by a great dragon that lay curly at the foot of the tree, and
never closed his eyes, watching it. And that was the very identical
Dragon you’re looking at this minute.”
“Tell us what happened then, Dearie,—when he didn’t close his eyes,”
urged Phyllisy, after they had looked again at the Dragon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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