they looked displeased again--"Now I am really
curious to know--have you heard of Zeppelin?"

"Zeppelin, no!--is he the King of Germany?" said the dwarf who had been
in the chair.

"Ha! ha!--King of Germany--well he _is_ nearly, in some people's eyes,"
said Karl. "He has built an airship; it is the most wonderful of all new
inventions, it floats in the air like a boat does in the water."

"Close by it passes, by soft breezes fanned,
Like a great steamboat straight from fairyland."

he went on in an enthusiastic way. "You can go for a ride in it any day
in Frankfurt, providing the weather is fine and you can afford to pay
L15!"

"Just listen to him, just listen to him!" said the dwarfs. "We don't
believe a word you have said. You are imposing on our credulity, you bad
man," and thereupon they flew at him and began to beat him with their
clubs, which were heavily weighted, and to pinch him with their long
fingers.

It might have gone hardly with him, but quick as thought Karl flashed
out the little revolver from his pocket. They seemed to know the meaning
of that modern toy; for they crouched back trembling, and not daring to
move.

"Now stop it, will you," he said, "or I shall have to shoot you, and
take you home with me to be stuffed or put into the National
Anthropological Museum. They would give me a good price for you," he
said musingly--"they would think you were The Missing Link."

"O please, Mr Hammerstein, don't shoot us--("however did the little
chaps find out my name!" thought Karl) we will believe all you say, even
if it seems the greatest nonsense to us. After all birds fly, bats fly
and fairies fly, why should not ships and trains fly?" said the
spokesman, who, I must tell you, was a relation of King Reinhold in the
Taunus Mountains and was proud of belonging to a royal family.

Karl called him Mr Query, because he was so fond of asking questions,
but so slow to take in a new fact, as indeed were all the dwarfs.

"You promised us _Christmas Tree_ not to harm us," said Mr Query,
reproachfully.

"Well, I didn't hurt anyone, did I, but how about your treatment of me?
That wasn't in the contract either," said Karl.

Meanwhile Karl looked about him curiously. He had never been to
dwarfland before, and might never have the chance of visiting it again,
and he did not wish to lose the opportunity of seeing all he could.

"Are there any more of you?" he asked the dwarfs.

"I should think so," th