ver and the floor was all of gold. Perhaps you don't know--no, I
suppose you don't know--still you may happen to have heard of this
before: the fairies know just where to find pretty much all the gold
and silver and precious stones that there are in the world, if they
happen to want them. They don't want much of them, of course--only
just enough to make the walls and the roofs and the floors of their
houses of, and to put all over their clothes and to make all their
furniture and dishes of, and all their carriages and their boats, and
a few other things--but they know where to find plenty of gold and
silver, if they want it.

Now I think that I had better give you a little science. I believe
that a book which children are to read, always ought to teach
something, so I mean to teach you as much as I can. You must know,
then, that gold is one of the heaviest things in the world. Now you
know that the earth is always whirling round and round, so that the
things that it is made of naturally get shaken up more or less.
Besides that, it was once a good deal softer than it is now, so that
the things that it is made of could move about more than they can now.
And so the most of the gold, being, as I said, one of the heaviest
things, got sifted down toward the bottom--that is, toward the centre
of the earth. Only a little of it was left near the top, compared with
what went to the bottom. It would not be at all surprising if the
middle of the earth were a solid lump of gold, a thousand miles thick.
But we poor men cannot dig down very deep into the earth. We can only
scratch a little dirt off the top, and if we happen to grub up a few
pounds of gold we think that we are rich, and the rest of the world
thinks so too.

But the fairies laugh at us. They know how to go as deep into the
earth as they choose, and so any fairy who chooses can give away gold
all his life, and still have more of it in his dust-bin all the time
than all the kings in the world have in their treasuries. And the
other fairies don't call him rich.

But now we will go back to the rath. Of course it was all under the
ground, so that there was no daylight. At the time we are talking
about, there would not have been any anyway, for it was night. The
place was lighted up with thousands of diamonds and rubies and
emeralds, which were set all over the ceiling and shone like lamps.
Now I won't call you ignorant just because you say that you don't
understand how d