It was a tiny lizard, about half an inch long--with scales and wings. So now the doctor and the professor each had a specimen, and they were both very pleased. But before long these specimens began to seem less valuable. For the next morning, when the knife-boy was cleaning the doctor's boots, he suddenly dropped the brushes and the boot and the blacking, and screamed out that he was burnt. And from inside the boot came crawling a lizard as big as a kitten, with large, shiny wings. "Why," said Effie, "I know what it is. It is a dragon like the one St. George killed." And Effie was right. That afternoon Towser was bitten in the garden by a dragon about the size of a rabbit, which he had tried to chase, and the next morning all the papers were full of the wonderful "winged lizards" that were appearing all over the country. The papers would not call them dragons, because, of course, no one believes in dragons nowadays--and at any rate the papers were not going to be so silly as to believe in fairy stories. At first there were only a few, but in a week or two the country was simply running alive with dragons of all sizes, and in the air you could sometimes see them as thick as a swarm of bees. They all looked alike except as to size. They were green with scales, and they had four legs and a long tail and great wings like bats' wings, only the wings were a pale, half-transparent yellow, like the gear-boxes on bicycles. They breathed fire and smoke, as all proper dragons must, but still the newspapers went on pretending they were lizards, until the editor of the _Standard_ was picked up and carried away by a very large one, and then the other newspaper people had not anyone left to tell them what they ought not to believe. So when the largest elephant in the Zoo was carried off by a dragon, the papers gave up pretending--and put ALARMING PLAGUE OF DRAGONS at the top of the paper. [Illustration: "The largest elephant in the zoo was carried off." _See page 43._]