Set a Purpose

A dragon scares everyone in the kingdom.

Find out what the king does about it.

There was once a king whose kingdom was plagued by a dragon. The king did not know which way to turn. The king’s knights were all cowards. They hid under their beds whenever the dragon came in sight. They were of no use to the king at all. And the king’s wizard could not help either because, being old, he had forgotten his magic spells. Nor could the wizard look up the spells that had slipped his mind. He had unfortunately misplaced his wizard’s book many years before. The king was at his wit’s end.

Every time there was a full moon the dragon came out of his lair and ravaged the countryside. He frightened maidens and stopped up chimneys. He broke store windows and set people’s clocks back. He even made dogs bark until no one could hear himself think.

He tipped over fences and robbed graves and put frogs in people’s drinking water and tore the last chapters out of novels.

He stole spark plugs out of people’s cars and put firecrackers in people’s cigars and stole the clappers from all the church bells. He sprung every bear trap for miles around so the bears could wander wherever they pleased.

And to top it all off, he changed around all the roads in the kingdom. People could not get anywhere except by starting out in the wrong direction.

“That,” said the king in a fury, “is enough!” And he called a meeting of everyone in the kingdom.

Now it happened that there lived in the kingdom a wise old cobbler who had a wife and three sons. The cobbler and his family came to the king’s meeting and stood way in back by the door. The cobbler had a feeling that since he was nobody important there had probably been some mistake. No doubt the king had intended the meeting for everyone in the kingdom except his family and him.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the king when everyone was present, “I’ve put up with that dragon as long as I can. He has got to be stopped.”