The horse was coming down the trail at a sloppy gallop. Bestriding it was a small and dumpy figure that bounced most amazingly with each motion of its mount. It was a far from graceful rider, with its elbows thrust out on either side of it, flapping like a pair of wings.

The horse came tearing down the slope and swung out on the green. It was no more graceful than its rider, but a shaggy plough horse, and its mighty hoofs, beating like great hammers, tore up clods of turf and flung them far behind it. It came straight at the flier, almost as if intent on running over it, then at the last moment wheeled clumsily and came to a shuddering halt, to stand with its sides heaving in and out like bellows, and snorting through its flabby nostrils.

Its rider slid awkwardly off its back and when he hit the ground, exploded in a gust of wrath.

"It is them no-good bummers!" he shouted. "It is them lousy trolls. I've told them and I've told them to leave them broomsticks be. But no, they will not listen. They always make the joke. They put enchantment on them."

"Mr. O'Toole," Maxwell shouted. "You remember me?"

The goblin swung around and squinted at him with red-filmed, nearsighted eyes.

"The professor!" he screamed. "The good friend of all of us. Oh, what an awful shame! I tell you, Professor, the hides of them trolls I shall nail upon the door and pin their ears on trees."

"Enchantment?" Churchill asked. "Do you say enchantment?"

"What other would it be?" Mr. O'Toole fumed. "What else would bring a broomstick down out of the sky?"

He ambled closer to Maxwell and peered anxiously at him. "Can it be really you?" he asked, with some solicitude. "In the honest flesh? We had word that you had died. We sent the wreath of mistletoe and holly to express our deepest grief."

"It is I, most truly," said Maxwell, slipping easily into the idiom of the Little Folk. "You heard rumor only."