The last dragon

no more mysterious lurking place for a coily, fire-breathing beast than the shadowy woodlot with its thick thimble berry thicket; its black cave under the drippy spring-shelf, and its close-grown oaks and maples. Indeed, there was always something terrifying to the children about the woodlot, even when the sun pierced through its wall of branches and leaves. The thimble berry thicket had never been completely explored, and as for the oozy cave—well, Johnathan had ventured in as far as the first bend once, holding a bit of lighted candle, but the candle had been blown out, and he had rushed back to wide-eyed Peter and Janet Jane who had stayed outside, peering in at the cave’s black mouth. Johnathan, when he could get his breath, vowed he saw something strange around the bend, just before the candle flickered out, but Johnathan had a vivid imagination (it was he who made-up all the plays and all the games that took place in the meadow and spilled over into the woodlot on Saturdays) and whether he really did see something strange around the bend or had just imagined it, Peter and Janet Jane could not be sure. Their mother said he had just imagined it, of course! “What nonsense, Johnathan! You’re too old to imagine such things! No wonder you were so poor in arithmetic this month!” Johnathan really didn’t see the connection. But that wasn’t all about the woodlot! Peter, just six, said he had heard a lion roaring in the thimble berry thicket one stilly evening when he had gone back to find his lost cap in the meadow, but then Peter had a generous share of imagination too. “Lions are only in Africa or in a circus,” Janet Jane had said with feminine authority, but Peter replied in his well-known lisp and with his head cocked, that there was no good reason why a lion couldn’t be found in a thimble berry thicket just as well as a badger or a chipmunk, and no amount of argument could convince him otherwise. Suppose lions didn’t eat thimble berries? Couldn’t one have been in the thicket for some other reason, or couldn’t one have been there for no reason at all? Why should there always be a reason for things? Peter liked to go places for no reason. Maybe lions did too!