Adventure, January 20, 1922 — page 120: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

118 seemed unkillable. Leaving the worm, and writhing with a new, strange pain that had come upon him, the emperor crawled across the pool to the base of a water-lily, whose broad, plate-like leaves above cast a cool cav- ern of shade far down into the stilly depths. It would appear that the emperor had been taken ill—that he had been poisoned, perhaps, by one of his victims. In truth, however, he was merely about to change his clothes. - He would be nearly two years old, per- haps, by this time, and, like most people, he had changed his clothes during that period several times, for the very simple reason that he grew out of the old ones. The phenomenon always made him feel rather unwell and off his feed—the only time, indeed, he was not hungry, though this was not to be wondered at, seeing that he changed everything, literally, from tip of head to end of each six feet. Never, however, had his tailoring made him feel so bad as now. For many hours the emperor kept very quiet in the shade—all the demon gone out of him fora space. Thereafter a great desire for fresh air, real fresh air—not the diluted kind he condensed out of the water by means of the lungs placed at the base of his tails—came upon him, and he slowly climbed the stem of one of the water-plants growing in the semi-transparent world around. He was checked a little at the surface film, which is like unimaginably fine elastic, and not easy to break through, even for an insect of his considerable size, but the vision of a ghostly fish shape growing, so to speak, out of the water-haze below, urged him on, and he was soon up the stem and out in the open. For the first time in his life the emperor found himself looking down upon the water as we see it; for the first time felt the free wind of heaven; for the first time basked in the sun. And this was more of a daring adventure than it looked for him, seeing that his breathing apparatus was made for use under the water only, and not above it. It looked asgif the emperor were going to commit suicide. But he did not—he split his back instead. NOW if you think that this would be much the same thing as com- mitting suicide, it shows that you are not en bon rapport with the private life of such emperors. This one was but chang- Adventure ing his suit, and with it his whole life, for lo! out of the loathly cockroach-pantomime- mask incarnation there uprose, damp and limp at first it is true, and with no end of a struggle (he had taken firm hold of the stem with the claws of his old self, however) a regal, splendid, glistening dragon-fly, full blown, full grown, and all brand new. We may take stock of him while he dries and hardens his plating; while he shakes out his wings—till that hour folded miraculously in the aforementioned wing-pads upon his old self; while he straightens out each groggy leg, tests his feelers, and, above all, polishes and sharpens his terrible jaws— a brand new set, too, and like shears. No more “mask” under-lip for him now. We may see that his very long, and very slender body was uniformed in the palest of pale blue, so delicate a tint that it might almost have been green, with a “bloom” _like the “bloom” upon a peach. In certain lights, though, when the sun caught him, he looked white, and I have seen him silver. His two big and three small eyes, that were in themselves a marvel, the former having some ten thousand lenses, looked like rubies, and together covered nearly the whole of his head. His chest portion was broad and strong, to carry the immensely powerful flying muscles. His very large wings, a double set, strongly suggestive of a biplane’s vans, though colorless, looked like wafers cut from the very diamond, such was their wonderful polish, and his jaws— well, his jaws were the weapons of a dragon, that’s all. The sun had been up some time, and had drunk all the dew off the grass, and the “heat flurry” was beginning to dance over the level corn, next morning, before the em- peror “‘took the air.”’ Mind, he had never flown before in, all his life, yet he removed from that cool, green stem he was on, and out across the sunlight over the pond, with such amazing speed that to the poor, slow human eye he seemed to have just burned up in a dazzling streak of rainbow hues, which represented the glitter of his wings. So astonishingly quick indeed was he, that not only must the blue-bottle fly, bustling across the pond, have been dead in his jaws before he knew what had killed him, but when the dragon-fly himself backed air to settle upon a drooping willow spray, he simply seemed to have dropped out of no- where. And that was just the dragon-fly’s GomiGchdooks (C@