houses that he had seen, the
King was delighted with it. He found a big rock, which was the base of
a hill, and at the top of it stood a queer little square stone house.
Back in this hill, he declared, behind the rock and under the stone
house, would be as pleasant a place to live as ever the rath was. He
made the rock open, and he and all the fairies with him went in,
although the policemen and the men and women in carriages and on
horses and on bicycles and on foot who were all about, did not see
that the rock looked at all different.

"A fine place for us it will make," said the King; "we couldn't be
asking for a better. Get to work now, all of you. Hollow out the
inside of the hill, only leave pillars to hold up the roof, and go and
find gold for the floor and silver for the walls, and you can have
every other pillar gold and every other one silver, after you get the
rest done, and take down the rock that you left. And then find
diamonds and rubies and emeralds to light it with."

No, I am not going to explain to you how the fairies did all this. I
shall not tell you how they got the rock out nor what they did with it
after they got it out. I will tell you all that there is any need of
your knowing about it, and that is that in a very short time it was
all done; that the new fairy palace was as much larger and finer and
better than any fairy palace in Ireland ever was as we Americans
intend that everything here shall be larger and finer and better than
anything anywhere else. And it was all done before the most of the
messengers who had been sent in other directions got back to tell what
they had found.

These fairies went straight to where the O'Briens lived, and there the
fairies who had been left on guard told them where to find the King,
and asked them to say to him that they were tired of their duty and
they wished that he could send somebody else to take their places.

The fairies were not much surprised when they found the King and all
the tribe settled in a new palace, as comfortably as if they had never
moved. The building of a palace in a night is no more to a fairy than
it is to a New York man to come back after he has been out of town for
a month and find a house twenty stories high in a place where there
was a hole in the ground when he went away.

"What's the use at all to be tellin' Your Majesty what we've found in
the places we've been," said one of the first who came back, "and you
livin' thi