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.
In this mad fashion it shot ahead, and, a few minutes after, toddled in again among the rest, walking peacefully and somewhat painfully on its few fours.
From the time it takes to describe one of them it will be readily seen that it would hardly do to attempt a description of each of the forty-nine.