"Well,—I should smile!" he ejaculated, gravely staring.
The dragon was perennially smiling, with a wide pasteboard mouth, and some big pasteboard teeth.
Ned was in a strange world,—a great world of shams, where the trees were clots of green paint on immense canvas sheets stretched on tottering wooden frames, where hospitable castles had no substance, where mountain crags were trestles of various heights supporting spring mattresses, covered with dusty imitations of mosses and vines, on which desperate leaps might safely be made. There were ropes and pulleys, and windlasses, and drop-scenes, and swaying borders in the "flies" overhead in place of a firmament. There were squares here and there on the floor, which he knew were trapdoors, whence he had seen gnomes and elves spring up, when once there had been given a Christmas performance with free admission to working children.
Deep shadows gloomed on every hand, seeming the deeper because of the flood of light which irradiated the unseen region beyond the great "flats." No human creature was visible. Only one sound could now be heard,—a clear, resonant, tutored voice, reciting stately lines. Somehow the tones awed him.
He became aware in another moment that Pete was vaguely scuffling about the foundation of the building; he leaned far out of the window and stretched down both his arms.
"Hurry up, Pete," he adjured his friend; "they're just a-goin' it on the stage!"
Looking down, he thought the height of the window was considerably more than eight feet from the ground. Pete had a grievously foreshortened aspect. In fact he seemed little more than an old cap, bobbing about vivaciously on the paving-stones. These gyrations were in vain. Except during a spasmodic endeavor to walk up the wall like a fly which Pete called "climbing," he did not leave the earth at all, for he had not the fly's peculiar and special facilities. He was too clumsy to climb, too inactive, much too fat.
When he slid down for the last time, panting, bruised, exhausted, and almost ready to cry, Ned sought to encourage him to further exertions.
"Naw, sir!" replied Pete angrily. "I ain't goin' ter try it nare 'nother time,—break my neck along of your fool tricks the fust thing I know. Come down out of that window! I ain't a-goin' ter let ye see the play-actors if I can't. Come down!"
The printer's devil stared as he sat in the window.