te criminal characters who had now set themselves up here
as the nucleus of a ruling race.

In a moment now, we were the size of these giants. Twenty to twenty-five
feet tall, in relation to the environment. But I did not feel so. As I
stood up--still feeling myself in normal stature--I saw around me a
shrunken little landscape. The trees, as though in a Japanese garden,
were about my own height; the road was a smooth, level path; the little
field near us had a toy fence around it. On another road nearby a man
was walking. In height he would barely have reached my knees. He saw us
rise beside the trees. He darted off in alarm, and disappeared.

I have taken longer to tell all this than the actual time which passed.
We could see the boat coming from the island, and it was still a fair
distance off shore. We ran along the road, skirting the edge of the
little town. None of its houses were taller than ourselves. The windows
and doorways were ovals into which we could only have inserted a head or
an arm. Most of them were dark. Little people occasionally stared out,
saw us run past, and ducked back, thankful that we did not stop to
harass them.

"This way," said Glora. She ran like a faun, hardly winded, with Alan
and me heavily panting behind her. "There are trees--thick trees--quite
near where the boat lands. We can get in them and hide and change our
size to smallness. But hurry, for we shall need a great deal of time
when we are small!"

The little spread of town and the shining lake remained always to our
right. In five minutes we were past most of the houses. A patch of
woods, with thick, interlacing treetops about our own height, lay ahead.
It extended a few hundred feet over to the lake shore. The sailboat was
heading in close. There was a broad starlit roadway at the edge of the
lake, and a dock at which the boat was preparing to land.

Would we be in time? I suddenly feared not. To get small now, with
distance lengthening between us and the boat, would be disastrous. And
where was Polter?

Abruptly we saw him. There had been only little people visible to us:
none of our own height. The lake roadway by the dock was brightly
starlit. As we approached the intervening patch of woods it seemed that
a crowd of little people were near the dock. Polter must have been
sitting. But now he rose up. We could not mistake his thick hunched
figure, the lump on his shoulders clear in the starlight with the
gleaming lake as