t your enemy; not yet, anyhow. Indeed, I'm glad you've come,
for my life here is rather lonely. I've had no one to talk to since I
transformed Polychrome, the Daughter of the Rainbow, into a
canary-bird."

"How did you manage to do that?" asked the Tin Woodman, in amazement.
"Polychrome is a powerful fairy!"

"She _was_," said the Giantess; "but now she's a canary-bird. One day
after a rain, Polychrome danced off the Rainbow and fell asleep on a
little mound in this valley, not far from my castle. The sun came out
and drove the Rainbow away, and before Poly wakened, I stole out and
transformed her into a canary-bird in a gold cage studded with diamonds.
The cage was so she couldn't fly away. I expected she'd sing and talk
and we'd have good times together; but she has proved no company for me
at all. Ever since the moment of her transformation, she has refused to
speak a single word."

"Where is she now?" inquired Woot, who had heard tales of lovely
Polychrome and was much interested in her.

"The cage is hanging up in my bedroom," said the Giantess, eating
another biscuit.

The travelers were now more uneasy and suspicious of the Giantess than
before. If Polychrome, the Rainbow's Daughter, who was a real fairy, had
been transformed and enslaved by this huge woman, who claimed to be a
Yookoohoo, what was liable to happen to _them_? Said the Scarecrow,
twisting his stuffed head around in Mrs. Yoop's direction:

"Do you know, Ma'am, who we are?"

"Of course," said she; "a straw man, a tin man and a boy."

"We are very important people," declared the Tin Woodman.

"All the better," she replied. "I shall enjoy your society the more on
that account. For I mean to keep you here as long as I live, to amuse me
when I get lonely. And," she added slowly, "in this Valley no one ever
dies."

They didn't like this speech at all, so the Scarecrow frowned in a way
that made Mrs. Yoop smile, while the Tin Woodman looked so fierce that
Mrs. Yoop laughed. The Scarecrow suspected she was going to laugh, so he
slipped behind his friends to escape the wind from her breath. From this
safe position he said warningly:

"We have powerful friends who will soon come to rescue us."

[Illustration]

"Let them come," she returned, with an accent of scorn. "When they get
here they will find neither a boy, nor a tin man, nor a scarecrow, for
tomorrow morning I intend to transform you all into other shapes, so
that you cannot be recogn