To describe them were a hopeless task.
I knew a boy who used to make animals out of heather roots.
Wherever he could find four legs, he was pretty sure to find a head
and a tail. His beasts were a most comic menagerie, and right
fruitful of laughter. But they were not so grotesque and
extravagant as Lina and her followers. One of them, for instance,
was like a boa constrictor walking on four little stumpy legs near
its tail. About the same distance from its head were two little
wings, which it was forever fluttering as if trying to fly with
them. Curdie thought it fancied it did fly with them, when it was
merely plodding on busily with its four little stumps. How it
managed to keep up he could not think, till once when he missed it
from the group: the same moment he caught sight of something at a
distance plunging at an awful serpentine rate through the trees,
and presently, from behind a huge ash, this same creature fell
again into the group, quietly waddling along on its four stumps.
Watching it after this, he saw that, when it was not able to keep
up any longer, and they had all got a little space ahead, it shot
into the wood away from the route, and made a great round,
serpentine alone in huge billows of motion, devouring the ground,
undulating awfully, galloping as if it were all legs together, and
its four stumps nowhere.
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