"That made your hair curl, didn't it?" asked another Dragon, leaping over Harry.
"That's no business of yours," Harry snapped, as well as he could for crying.
"It's more my pleasure than business," retorted the Dragon.
"Keep it to yourself, then," snapped Harry.
"I mean to share it with you, when I get hold of your hair," snapped the Dragon.
"Wait till you get the chance," Harry snapped, with desperate presence of mind.
"Do you know whom you're talking to?" roared the Dragon; and he opened his mouth from ear to ear, and shot out his forked tongue in Harry's face; and the boy was so frightened that he forgot to snap, and cried piteously,
"Oh, I beg your pardon, please don't!"
On which the blue Dragon clawed another handful of hair out of his head, and all the Dragons barked as before.
How long the dreadful game went on Harry never exactly knew. Well practised as he was in snapping in the nursery, he often failed to think of a retort, and paid for his unreadiness by the loss of his hair. Oh, how foolish and wearisome all this rudeness and snapping now seemed to him! But on he had to go, wondering all the time how near it was to twelve o'clock, and whether the Snap-Dragons would stay till midnight and take him with them to Vesuvius.