oment I quite lost the use of my tongue; and in
the meantime my little visitor was glancing about the room with piercing
eyes that seemed to take in everything.

"H'm!--writer, I suppose?" he said, nodding his head towards my desk,
which was as usual littered with papers. "What line? You don't look very
clever," and he glanced at me critically from under his bushy eyebrows.

"I only write books for children," I answered, "and one doesn't have to
be very clever to do that."

"Oh, children!" said the little Yellow Dwarf--as I had begun to call him
in my own mind. "No, you don't have to be _clever_, but you have to
be--er--by the way, do you write fairy stories?" he interrupted himself
to ask.

"Sometimes," I answered.

"Ah! then I can put you up to a thing or two. I'm partly a fairy
myself.

"You see, it's this way," he went on hastily, seeing, I suppose, that
I looked somewhat surprised at this unexpected piece of information.
"Some hundreds of years ago--oh! ever so many--long before the present
Japanese Empire was founded, in fact, there was a man named Shin Shira
Scaramanga Manousa Yama Hawa----"

"Good gracious!" I exclaimed.

"Don't interrupt," said the little Yellow Dwarf, "it's rude, and
besides, you make me forget--I can't even think now what the rest of the
gentleman's name was--but anyhow, he was an ancestor of mine, and that
much of his name belongs to me."

"How much?" I inquired.

"Shin Shira Scaramanga Manousa Yama Hawa," repeated the Yellow Dwarf;
"but you needn't say it all," he added hastily, seeing, I suppose, that
I looked rather distressed, "Shin Shira will do; in fact, that's what I
am always called. Well, to continue. This ancestor of mine, part of
whose name I bear, did something or other to offend his
great-grandmother, who was a very influential sort of a fairy--I _could_
tell you the whole story, but it's a very long one and I'll have to tell
you that another time--and she was so angry with him that she condemned
him to appear or disappear whenever she liked and at whatever time or
place that she chose, for ever."

"For ever?" I inquired incredulously.

"Why not?" asked Shin Shira. "Fairies, you know, are immortal,
and my ancestor had fairy blood in his veins. Well, to make a long
story short, the spell, or whatever you choose to call it, which his
great-grandmother cast over him, didn't work in him, nor in his son, nor
even in his grandson; but several hundreds of years afterwar