eneral said hastily: "Divvil a bit of it, sir. We're his
friends and he left us in the same boat--no, he left us out of the same
boat. It must've been that something important occurred to him----"

But it was not convincing. It seemed highly unconvincing, later,
because some long-delayed perception produced a reaction in the dinies'
minuscule brains. They became aware of their visitors. They appeared,
in a slow-motion fashion, to become interested in them. Slowly,
heavily, numbly, they congregated about them--the equivalent of a herd
of several hundred elephants of all the colors of the rainbow, with
small heads wearing plaintive but persistent expressions. Long necks
reached out hopefully.

"The devil!" said the Chancellor of the Exchequer, fretfully. "I'm just
thinkin'. You've iron in your shoes and mainsprings in your watches and
maybe pocket knives in your pockets. The dinies have a longin' for
iron, and they go after it. They'll eat anything in the world that's
got the barest bit of a taste of iron in it! Oh, it's perfectly all
right, of course, but ye'll have to throw stones at them till the boat
comes back. Better, find a good stout stick to whack them with. Only
don't let 'em get behind ye!"

"Ye will?" roared the solicitor general, vengefully. "Take that!"
_Whack!_ "Tryin' to take somethin' out of the gentleman's hip pocket
an' aimin' to grab the rump beyond it just to make sure!"

_Whack!_ A large head moved plaintively away. But another reached
hopefully forward, and another. The dinies were not bright. The three
committeemen and two members of the cabinet were thigh-deep in water
when the boat came back. They still whacked valorously if wearily at
intrusive diny heads. They still had made no progress in implanting the
idea that the dinies should go away.

The men from the mainland hauled them into the boat. They admitted that
the president had returned to Tara. Sean O'Donohue concluded that he
had gone back to supervise some shenanigans. He had. On the way to the
mainland Sean O'Donohue ground his teeth. On arrival he learned that
the president had taken Moira with him. He ground his teeth.
"Shenanigans!" he cried hoarsely. "After him!" He stamped his feet. His
fury was awe-inspiring. When the ground-car drivers started back to
Tara, Sean O'Donohue was a small, rigid embodiment of raging death and
destruction held only temporarily in leash.

On the way, even his companions of the committee were uneasy.