“I suppose,” mused Perry, “the Roc is just the Æpyornis exaggerated. After all, it’s only the other day that somebody found an Æpyornis egg bobbing up and down on the waves off Madagascar after a hurricane and that egg was nearly seven times as big as an ostrich egg. You can’t blame a fellow in Madagascar several centuries ago figuring that a bird to lay an egg like that must be seven times as tall as an ostrich. My eye, wouldn’t a bird over fifty feet high be a bogey! And yet they told me down at the Museum that an Æpyornis was really only about eleven feet high.” The Basilisk or Cockatrice was the next wonder that struck the boy’s gaze. Evidently his father had found some difficulty in securing a picture of the creature, for under the fantastic drawing were the words: “The Basilisk. This one I made up.” The monster resembled a serpent walking on its tail, in grand and imposing style, with two searchlights for eyes. On the opposite page was a quotation from John Swan, the author of the curious old book “Speculum Mundi” (A Mirror of the World), which was written in the first half of the seventeenth century. It read: “The Cockatrice is the king of Serpents, not for his magnitude or greatness, but for his stately pace and magnanimous mind. Among all living creatures there is none perisheth sooner by the poyson of a Cockatrice than a man; for with his sight he killeth him. His hissing is likewise said to be bad, in regard that it blasteth trees, killeth birds, etc., by poysoning the aire.” Perry turned over page after page. He saw the picture of the Humma, the bird without feet, that was supposed never to alight on the ground. There was a drawing of the Wak-Wak tree which had beautiful women for fruit. The Chimæra was not forgotten, with its head of a lion, body of a goat, and tail of a serpent. A whole section of the faded green book was given to the monsters who were half men, half beasts. There Perry saw his old friends the Centaurs, and among them Cheiron, “wisest of beasts and men,” human to the waist, with a horse’s body. Pan, playing on his pipes of reed, was sitting on a fallen tree-trunk, while goat-legged Satyrs and Fauns danced to his piping. One particularly creepy picture showed the Gorgons, with writhing poisonous snakes in place of hair, whom, the Greeks believed, it was death to look upon, and none of the monsters that were slain by Hercules, Theseus, and Perseus was forgotten. Little by little the spell of the old-time wonderland began to creep over Perry. At first these childish drawings of monsters had seemed impossible, but earnest belief in the artist always reveals itself in the picture, and Perry’s father, when a boy, had believed in these creatures just as did the ancient Greeks. The spirit of the boy who had fought the lynx, believing it to be a dragon, stirred on those pages and quickened Perry’s blood.