maybe be harder for you to hear; but
it's on my mind and I can't get it off my mind. Will you forgive me if
I say it?"

And the King answered: "It's much that's bad and a little that's good
we've heard since we left our own home. But it's best that we know all
there is to know, bad or good. Say what you have to say."

"It's not far I've been," said the fairy; "only around here in the
city that's all about us; but many things I've seen, and wonderful
things. Ah, Your Majesty, don't blame me for what I'm saying, but
what's to become of us all and of you yourself, I dunno. We know all
about magic; we've known all about it for years--aye, for ages. And we
thought that made us better than mortals. We thought they could never
do the things we could do; maybe they never can. But oh, Your Majesty,
they're doing things as good as we can do, or better. You wouldn't
believe what the mortals in this country do, if you wasn't after
seein' it. They do things as wonderful as we ourselves, and it's iron,
iron, iron everywhere. We can do nothing with iron--we can't touch
it--and what will we do at all to be ahead of them, or even up with
them?"

"What's all this they do?" said the King.

"You saw yourself," the fairy said, "the coaches that went along up in
the air. They go on bridges, miles long, built of iron. And they run
on bars of iron. You saw for yourself that they had no horses, and the
coach in front that pulls them is all made of iron, and men ride in
them, as if it was no harm at all to touch iron. And that's not all.
There are other coaches that go in the streets without horses. They
have no iron coach in front to pull them. They go in different ways.
Sometimes there's an iron rope, that's all the time moving and moving
along under the street, and there's a gripping iron under the coach
that takes hold on it, and so it's pulled along. And sometimes there's
only a little string--not iron, I think, but some other metal--and
something just reaches down from the coach and touches it, and that
makes it go. I dunno how it is, but it makes it go. And sometimes
there's fire comes out of it."

Then another fairy came out of the crowd and stood before the King.
"Your Majesty," he said, "I can tell you more than that. I have been
about the city, too, and I went into some of the houses. I saw a man
talking to a little box on the wall. I came close and I heard that the
box was talking to him too. I thought there was a fairy inside