100                   CHAMMY AND CIIAMMIETTA.

Fortunately, these most illustrious relatives, who once swarmed alive and dreadful in the mud of warm lagoons, swallowing all that came before them (especially their own relations), are now only to be seen mapped out in mortar, where their ghastly fossil skeletons show us what dragons of fifty or sixty feet long were like, and help us to feel thankful they all died before our day.

But those far-off cousins of the great dragons (Chammy and Chammietta) were saurians of the air, and not of the water—living their lives amongst trees, and flowers, and birds; carnivorous, indeed, as the rest of their race, but swallowing nothing larger than blue-bottles.

They were caught at the Cape of Good Hope about a month before they sailed for England, and seemed to have resented captivity extremely—poor Chammietta arriving with poor little toes crippled for life, injured in clinging to the wires of the cage in her frantic effort for liberty.

Her toes were never well again, and she was never safe upon them; so that her powers of clinging to a perch being much impaired, if she was left upon a bush, she seems to have been as often found under it as upon it; but none of her falls seemed to hurt her, except one memorable tumble with her tongue out, which I shall relate further on, as it nearly ended a remarkable career in a very remarkable way.

Chammy and Chammietta lived together for three years in their English home, anxiously watched and fed, guarded