come back again, and round and round the table he
went, laughing as if he would kill himself at the tiny people sprawling
helplessly in their big chairs.

The Prince helped himself to fruit and cakes and bonbons from the
table. He seated his royal mother on top of the sugar-bowl, and put the
poor old King in the salt-cellar. As for the Lord Chancellor, whom he
especially hated, Vance dumped the bewigged old fop into the pepper-box,
where he would really have sneezed himself to death in another minute,
had not the Blue Wizard fortunately appeared and given the unhappy man a
sudden bath in a finger-bowl.

"It worked well, didn't it?" the Blue Wizard observed with a grin, as he
put the Lord Chancellor, very white and limp, on the window-seat to dry
in the sun.

"Oh, awfully well!" Vance replied briskly, although secretly he was more
than a little afraid of this particular wizard, who seemed to be much
more sudden in his way of appearing and disappearing than the common
sort of wizards to which the Prince was accustomed.

"The worst of it is," remarked the Wizard, thoughtfully, pulling his
bushy eyebrows with his long blue fingers, "you can't change 'em back."

"What!" exclaimed the Prince, in his confusion dropping his father into
the pudding sauce and entirely ruining the royal robes. "Can't change
them back? But you must change them back if I tell you to."

[Illustration]

"Oh, as to that," the Blue Wizard answered carelessly, giving the king
in turn a bath in the finger-bowl, "what you say isn't of the least
consequence any way. In the first place, no wizard is bound to obey
anybody who does not himself know how to obey; and in the second place,
nobody can undo this particular charm but the Crushed Strawberry
Wizard."

"Very well, then," said Vance, imperiously, paying no attention whatever
to the first part of the Blue Wizard's remark; "go and get the Crushed
Strawberry Wizard."

"Get him yourself!" was the answer. "_I_ don't want him. It is nothing
to me, you know; this isn't my family."

"But where does the Crushed Strawberry Wizard live?" asked the Prince,
more humbly.

"I'm sure I've no idea," the Blue Wizard replied lightly; "and now I
think of it, I don't believe I care. I'm sure I don't see why I should."

"But it's all your fault," blubbered Vance, beginning to cry, and
sitting down upon his uncle, the Duke Ogee, without even noticing him
till the Duke wriggled so that Vance jumped up in a fright