it, but
I looked inside, and there was nothing there but iron and strange
works that I couldn't understand. There were little strings of copper
coming out of the box, and then a long string of iron, that led away
over the tops of the houses."

The fairy stopped and shivered as he thought of the horrible string of
iron. Then he went on: "I followed it and it came into another house,
where there was so much iron that I couldn't stay there. But the
strings of iron came out of this house and led in all directions. I
followed them and I listened everywhere and I found what they were
for, though how they do it all I dunno. And it's this way: Anywhere
that there's a box you can talk to them that's in the house where all
the iron strings go. And if they like to help you, you can talk to
anybody else where there's a box. It may be a mile off or it may be a
dozen miles off. Many a time those in the house where all the strings
are will not help them that wants to talk, but when they will, it's
easy. Yes, Your Majesty, one man talks to another ten miles off, as if
he was standing by his side."

"Your Majesty," said another fairy, "you saw yourself the bright
lights that were at the place where the grass was, that we came to
first, and you've seen thousands more of them since. Do you know that
they're not candles, and they're not lamps, and that there's no fire
to them at all? There's strings of something, whatever it is, from one
of them to another, and the light goes through that, whatever it is."

"There's another thing that they do with strings like that," said
still another fairy. "I saw men doing it not far from here. They made
a hole in a rock and they put one end of a string in it. Then where
the other end was, a man pushed a thing like a sort of handle, and the
rock was all burst open, and nobody had touched it."

And another fairy said: "Your Majesty, there are boats all the time
going across the rivers--across the running water. Of course we always
knew that mortals could cross running water, but these boats go
without sails or oars, like the ship that we came here on. To be sure
I couldn't go on one, because it was across running water, but I went
near one, when it was at the shore, and it was all full of iron, and I
got the most awful pains from being near it. It was as bad, almost, as
I felt coming here, when I'ld get too near the iron sides of the
ship."

"And a strange thing it was that I saw too," said anothe