"Why should he shed his old skin and get a new one? Is the new one different; a different color or shape or something?"
"No; not a different color or different shape especially, but a different size. The dragon is growing up. He is like a boy who keeps on wearing age-nine clothes until they are too short in the sleeves, too tight in the back, and too high-water in the legs. Then one day he sheds his age-nine suit and gets an age-eleven one. See?"
"What a funny professor you are! Is that the way you lecture to your classes?"
"Gracious, no, Mary! This is the way: As the immature dragon grows older, his constant assimilation of food tends to create a natural increase in size. But the comparative inelasticity of his chitinized cuticula prevents the actual expansion, to any considerable degree, of his body mass. Thus all the cells of the body become turgid, and altogether a great pressure is exerted outwards against the enclosing cuticular wall. This wall then suddenly splits along the longimesial line of the dorsum, and through this rent the dragon extricates itself in soft and defenceless condition, but of markedly larger size. The new cuticula, which is pale, elastic and thin at first, soon becomes thicker, strongly chitinized and dark. The old cuticle, or exuvia, which has been moulted, is curiously complete, and is a hollow or shell-like replica of the external appearance of the dragon even to the finest details. How is that, Mary?"
"Very instruct—instructing"—with an effort—"indeed," replies Mary, with grave face. "But I guess I understand the change from age-nine to age-eleven clothes better."
And then we saw the third wonderful happening in our dragon's life that I said we should tell about. We saw one of the dragons getting wings! That is, changing from an ugly, blackish, squat, crawling creature into a glorious long-bodied, rainbow-tinted, flying dragon. Another dragon had crawled up above the water on a plant-stem and was also "moulting its chitinized cuticula." But it was coming out from the old skin in very different shape and color. I had forgotten, when I told Mary that they only changed in size after casting the skin, about the last moulting. Each dragon casts its skin several times in its life, but the last time it does it, it makes the wonderful change I've already spoken about, from crawling to flying dragon. And it was one of these last skin-castings that was going on now under our very eyes.
I can't describe all that happened. You must see it for yourself some time. How, out of the great rent in the old skin along the back, the soft damp body of the dragon squeezes slowly out, with its constant revelation of delicate changing color and its graceful new shape; how out of the odd shapeless pads on the back come four, long, narrow, shining, transparent wings, with complex framework of fine little veins, or ribs, and thin flexible glassy membrane stretched over them; how the new head looks with its enormous, sparkling, iridescent eyes making nearly two-thirds of it and so cleverly fitted on the body that it can turn nearly entirely around on the neck. And then how the body fills out and takes shape, and the wings get larger and larger, and everything more and more beautifully colored! All this you will have to see for yourself some time when you have a Monday Pond in your own study, with a brood of dragons in.
"It is wonderful, isn't it, Mary? How would you like to see twenty, thirty, forty, oh, a hundred dragons doing this all at once. We can if we want to. All we have to do is to go over to Lagunita some morning early, very early, just a little after sunrise—for that is their favorite time—and we shall see scores of dragons crawling up out of the water on stones, plants, sticks, anything convenient, and sloughing off their dirty, dark, old skins and coming out in their beautiful iridescent green and violet and purple new skins, with their long slender body and great flashing wings. They sit quietly on the stones and plant-stems until the warm rising sun dries them and their new skins get firm and all nicely fitted, and then they begin their new life,—wheeling and dashing over the lake and among the hills and bushes and above the grasses and grain along the banks. Like eagles and hawks they are seeking their prey. Watch that little gnat buzzing there in the air. A flying dragon swoops by and there is no gnat there any longer. It has been caught in the curious basket-like trap which the dragon makes with its spiny legs all held together, and it is being crushed and chewed by the great jaws. Still a dragon, you see, for all of its new beauty!"
Mary muses. "Not all beautiful things in the world are good, are they?" she murmurs.
"Mary, you are a philosopher," I say.