Free The Dragon in the Cliff by Sheila Cole Page B

dragon. But what a head it turned out to be! It was four feet long, as big as an eight-year-old child, with a snout filled with sharp teeth that ran almost its entire length.
    If that was the head, how much bigger must the body have been, I thought. But to my bitter disappointment the body was not where I expected it to be.

AN ACCIDENT LEADS TO A DISCOVERY
    No sooner did we have the head laid out in the workshop than all the neighbors and friends from our quarter of Lyme came to see for themselves “the monster’s head” that the Anning children brought back from the beach. They crowded into the tiny shop, joking and jostling one another. It was an amazing scene, one which I don’t think I’ll ever forget.
    â€œI wouldn’t have such a thing in my house,” Mr. Cruikshanks said, poking it with his pipe. “Wouldn’t be able to sleep knowing there was a dragon there.”
    â€œâ€™Fraid it might come to life, John?” asked Mr. Adams, with a guffaw.
    â€œYou never know,” Mr. Cruikshanks replied. “Now that it’s not buried in the cliff, it might come back to life. I heard such stories, things people thought were gone, come back.…”
    Mrs. Cruikshanks gave Mr. Cruikshanks a withering look. “Told over a glass of brandy, no doubt,” she commented.
    Mr. Halowell the jailer, who came in from the jail next door with his round little wife, poked his finger in the monster’s mouth and exclaimed, “Did you ever see such a mouthful of teeth?”
    â€œYou could borrow some for your own mouth, Rob. I don’t think the beast would miss them,” his wife told him, much to everyone’s amusement.
    I was flushed with happiness at all of this attention. I told them that in cleaning away the stone from around the fossil’s teeth, I had found that it had teeth in different stages of growth, which made me think that it grew new teeth to replace the old.
    â€œWish I could do the same,” Mr. Halowell replied, laughing at himself.
    Of course Lizzie, who was my closest friend, came. She had been to the beach when we were working on extracting the fossil. Now she came to see the fossil laid out in the shop, bringing Caroline Gleed and Jane Lovett along. Despite their contempt for me and for my fossil hunting, Caroline and Jane were eager to see “the monster’s head” that everyone else in our quarter of town was talking about.
    â€œMy brother says that it is so ugly it must belong to the devil,” Caroline said, pushing past me and going directly to the fossil. Seeing it, she gasped, and stepped back. “He’s right. It is ugly. A monster!” Then turning to me, she said, “You must be the only girl in all of England who could find such a thing, Mary.”
    â€œThe only girl who is queer enough to want to,” commented Jane, loud enough so that I could hear.
    Struggling to keep my temper, I answered, “No one has ever found such a fossil before. We don’t really know what it is.”
    â€œFossil?” Lizzie asked. She, like almost everyone in Lyme then, called them curiosities.
    â€œA fossil is a curiosity,” I explained.
    â€œAny fool can see that it is a petrified monster,” Jane said.
    Trying to salvage the situation, Lizzie said, “Some people say that it is the head of a crocodile.”
    â€œIt does look something like the pictures of crocodiles,” I admitted. “That’s what Squire Henley called it.”
    â€œWhatever it is, be glad it does not live in England now,” Jane said. And with that she and Caroline turned away and left the shop.
    This upset Lizzie, who, despite all of her efforts to smooth things over, was caught once again between me and others. “I should have known better than to bring them here. But everyone was talking about your find, and they wanted to see it. They said they wouldn’t come unless I came with them. They think you