THE DRAGON OF WINTER HILL

This is the tale the old men tell, the tale that was told to me,

Of the blue-green dragon,

The dreadful dragon,

The dragon who flew so free,

The last of his horrible scaly race

Who settled and made his nesting place

Some hundreds of thousands of years ago.

One day, as the light was falling low

And the turbulent wind was still,

In a stony hollow,

Where none dared follow,

Beyond the ridge on the gorse-clad summit, the summit of Winter Hill!

The news went round in the camp that night; it was Dickon who brought it first

How the wonderful dragon,

The fiery dragon,

On his terrified eyes had burst.

“I was out,” he said, “for a fat young buck,

But never a touch I had of luck;

And still I wandered and wandered on

Till all the best of the day was gone;

When, suddenly, lo, in a flash of flame

Full over the ridge a green head came,

A green head flapped with a snarling lip,

And a long tongue set with an arrow's tip.

I own I did n't stand long at bay,

But I cast my arrows and bow away,

And I cast my coat, and I changed my plan,

And forgot the buck, and away I ran —

And, oh, but my heart was chill:

For still as I ran I heard the bellow

Of the terrible slaughtering fierce-eyed fellow

Who has made his lair on the gorse-clad summit, the summit of Winter Hill.”

Then the women talked, as the women will, and the men-folk they talked too

Of the raging dragon,

The hungry dragon,

The dragon of green and blue.

And the Bards with their long beards flowing down,

They sat apart and were seen to frown.

But at last the Chief Bard up and spoke,

“Now I swear by beech and I swear by oak,

By the grass and the streams I swear,” said he,

“This dragon of Dickon's puzzles me.

For the record stands, as well ye know,

How a hundred years and a year ago

We dealt the dragons a smashing blow

By issuing from our magic tree

A carefully-framed complete decree,

Which ordered dragons to cease to be.

Still, since our Dickon is passing sure

That he saw a regular Simon pure.

Some dragon's egg, as it seems, contrived

To elude our curses, and so survived

On an inaccessible rocky shelf,

Where at last it managed to hatch itself.

Whatever the cause, the result is plain:

We're in for a dragon-fuss again.

We have n't the time, and, what is worse,

We have n't the means to frame a curse.

So what is there left for us to say

Save this, that our men at break of day

Must gather and go to kill

The monstrous savage

Whose fire-blasts ravage

The flocks and herds on the gorse-clad summit, the summit of Winter Hill?”