* * * * * The title of my tale has enabled you to guess the source of that smoke: the nostrils of some dreadful dragon. But had you been the little girl named Thia, by whom first that smoke was seen, you would not have come upon the truth so quickly. Thia had slept out under the stars, and, waking as they faded, had risen, brushed the dew from her arms and legs, shaken it off her little goatskin tunic, and gone with no glance around or upward to look for mushrooms. Presently, as there seemed to be no mushrooms this morning anywhere, she let her eyes rove from the ground (ground that is now Lord Lansdowne’s courtyard) and, looking up, saw the thick smoke above the hill. She saw that it came from the cave where dwelt the widow Gra with her four children. How could Gra, how could any one, want a fire just now? Thia’s dark eyes filled with wonder. On wintry nights it was proper that there should be a fire at the mouth of every cave, proper that in wintry dawns these should still be smouldering. But--such smoke as this on such a morning! Heavier, thicker smoke than Thia had ever seen in all the ten years of her existence! Of course fire was a god. But surely he would not have us worship him to-day? Why then had Gra lit him? Thia gave it up, and moved away with eyes downcast in renewed hope of mushrooms. She had not gone far before she stared back again, hearing a piteous shrill scream from the hill. She saw a little boy flying headlong down the slope--Thol, the little red-haired boy who lived in the other cave up there. Thol slipped, tumbled head over heels, rolled, picked himself up, saw Thia, and rushed weeping towards her. ‘What ails you, O child?’ asked Thia, than whom Thol was indeed a year younger and much smaller. ‘O!’ was all that the child vouchsafed between his sobs, ‘O!’ Thia thought ill of tears. Scorn for Thol fought the maternal instinct in her. But scorn had the worst of it. She put her arms about Thol. Quaveringly he told her what he had just seen, and what he believed it to be, and how it lay there asleep, with just its head and tail outside Gra’s cave, snoring. Then he broke down utterly. Thia looked at the hill. Maternal instinct was now worsted by wonder and curiosity and the desire to be very brave--to show how much braver than boys girls are. Thia went to the hill, shaking off Thol’s wild clutches and leaving him behind. Thia went up the hill quickly but warily, on tiptoe, wide-eyed, with her tongue out upon her underlip. She took a sidelong course, and she noticed a sort of black path through the grass, winding from the mouth of Gra’s cave, down one side of the hill, and away, away till it was lost in the white mists over the marshes. She climbed nearly level with the cave’s mouth, and then, peering through a bush which hid her, saw what lay behind the veil of smoke.