A new toolkit, divergence in perpendicular recurrence plot (DPRP), which can roughly reflect the largest Lyapunov exponent (LLE), is proposed to consider a dynamical divergence of attractor reconstructed from very short time series. This method is tested respectively with the stationary and the nonstationary time series generated from the Lorenz system. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.