and waiting to cheer, but the trees were
occupied. By black snakes. They hung in tasteful draperies among the
branches, sometimes two or three together. They gazed with intense
interest at the scene below them. The solicitor general, following Sean
O'Donohue, saw a black snake wriggling deftly between the legs of the
packed populace--packed as if to observe a parade--to get a view from
the very edge of the curb. The Chancellor of the Exchequer came
apprehensively behind the solicitor general.

Sean O'Donohue burst through the ranks of onlookers. He stalked out
onto the empty center of the street. He looked neither to right nor
left. He was headed for the presidential mansion, there to strangle
President O'Hanrahan in the most lingering possible manner.

But there came a roar of rejoicing which penetrated even his
single-tracked, murder-obsessed brain. He turned, purple-face and
explosive, to see what the obscene sound could mean.

He saw. The lean and lanky figure of the chief justice of the supreme
court of the Planet Eire came running down the street toward him. He
bore a large slab of sheet-iron.

As he ran, he played upon it the blue flame of a welding torch. The
smell of hot metal diffused behind him. The chief justice ran like a
deer. But he wasn't leaving anything behind but the smell. Everything
else was close on his heels.

A multicolored, multitudinous, swarming tide of dinies filled the
highway from gutter to gutter. From the two-inch dwarfs to the
purple-striped variety which grew to eight inches and sometimes fought
cats, the dinies were in motion. They ran in the wake of the chief
justice, enthralled and entranced by the smell of hot sheet iron. They
were fascinated. They were bemused. They were aware of nothing but that
ineffable fragrance. They hopped, ran, leaped, trotted and galloped in
full cry after the head of the planet's supreme court.

He almost bumped into the stunned Sean O'Donohue. As he passed, he
cried: "Duck, man! The dinies are comin' tra-la, tra-la!"

But Sean O'Donohue did not duck. He was fixed, stuck, paralyzed in his
tracks. And the dinies arrived. They ran into him. He was an obstacle.
They played leapfrog over each other to surmount him. He went down and
was merely a bump in the flowing river of prismatic colorings which
swarmed after the racing chief justice.

But there was a limit to things. This was not the first such event in
Tara, this day. The dinies, this time, fill