‘Have the goodness to enter.’
‘Good!’ says Drakestail to himself, ‘I shall now see how they eat at court.’
‘This way, this way,’ says the porter. ‘One step further.... There, there you are.’
‘How? what? in the poultry yard?’
Fancy how vexed Drakestail was!
‘Ah! so that’s it,’ says he. ‘Wait! I will compel you to receive me. Quack, quack, quack, when shall I get my money back?’ But turkeys and chickens are creatures who don’t like people that are not as themselves. When they saw the new-comer and how he was made, and when they heard him crying too, they began to look black at him.
‘What is it? what does he want?’
Finally they rushed at him all together, to overwhelm him with pecks.
‘I am lost!’ said Drakestail to himself, when by good luck he remembers his comrade friend Fox, and he cries:
‘Reynard, Reynard, come out of your earth,
Or Drakestail’s life is of little worth.’