Glinda earnestly, "if you can recall enough
of your witchcraft to enable us to raise the sunken island to the
surface of the lake. Tell us that and I'll give you a string of pearls
to wear around your neck and add to your beauty."

"Nothing can add to my beauty, for I'm the most beautiful creature
anywhere in the whole world."

"But how can we raise the island?"

"I don't know and I don't care. If ever I knew I've forgotten, and I'm
glad of it," was the response. "Just watch me circle around and see me
glitter!

"It's no use," said Button Bright; "the old Swan is too much in love
with herself to think of anything else."

"That's a fact," agreed Betsy with a sigh; "but we've got to get Ozma
and Dorothy out of that lake, somehow or other."

"And we must do it in our own way," added the Scarecrow.

"But how?" asked Uncle Henry in a grave voice, for he could not bear to
think of his dear niece Dorothy being out there under water; "how shall
we do it?"

"Leave that to Glinda," advised the Wizard, realizing he was helpless
to do it himself.

"If it were just an ordinary sunken island," said the powerful
sorceress, "there would be several ways by which I might bring it to
the surface again. But this is a Magic Isle, and by some curious art of
witchcraft, unknown to any but Queen Coo-ce-oh, it obeys certain
commands of magic and will not respond to any other. I do not despair
in the least, but it will require some deep study to solve this
difficult problem. If the Swan could only remember the witchcraft that
she invented and knew as a woman, I could force her to tell me the
secret, but all her former knowledge is now forgotten."

"It seems to me," said the Wizard after a brief silence had followed
Glinda's speech, "that there are three fishes in this lake that used to
be Adepts at Magic and from whom Coo-ee-oh stole much of her knowledge.
If we could find those fishes and return them to their former shapes,
they could doubtless tell us what to do to bring the sunken island to
the surface."

"I have thought of those fishes," replied Glinda, "but among so many
fishes as this lake contains how are we to single them out?"

You will understand, of course, that had Glinda been at home in her
castle, where the Great Book of Records was, she would have known that
Ervic the Skeezer already had taken the gold and silver and bronze
fishes from the lake. But that act had been recorded in the Book after
Glinda had set out o