hat is true, but the Evil Magician does not
measure years as you do. On his kitchen wall hangs the year clock. It
has only one hand, and the figures on its face run from one to fifteen.
Each figure represents one of your years, but the hand of the clock has
to go completely around the dial and reach the figure fifteen before
the Magician counts a year. In therefore what has been five years to
us in the Magician's house has been seventy-five years to you. That is
the reason why the Magician and the witch seem so old to you, who know
that they have been living for hundreds of years. They are really not
very old after all."

"But how did you get here?" asked Prince Redmond, who was becoming very
much interested in the small Princess.

"One day," answered the Princess, "I overhead the Evil Magician telling
the old witch to prepare a bed in the cellar for a Queen."

"Good mercy," cried the Duchess. "My dear niece in that dreadful
place. Oh, what shall I do?" And she began to weep afresh, but Daimur
was so interested in the story that he hardly heard her.

"What happened next?" he asked breathlessly.

"The next day the Queen arrived, so beautiful and so sad. I loved her
at once, and was happy to be with her when I might. She told me that
she had a chest full of gold in her palace, but that her aunt had the
key to it, and that she had mysteriously disappeared. She was afraid
she had been murdered. A foreign king, a kind of pirate, had been
threatening to invade her kingdom for more than a year, and she had
been able to keep him off for a time, but at last she had no more
soldiers to oppose against him and he would have taken the kingdom had
not the Evil Magician, in the form of a young and handsome knight,
offered to lend her as much gold as was in the treasure chest until
such time as she could get another key, for she had found that the
chest was a magic one and could neither be broken into nor moved from
where it stood.

"The pirate king took the money and went away, but in a few months the
Evil Magician came back and demanded payment for his gold or that the
Queen would marry him at once.

"The Queen refused to marry him and could not pay him, so he took her
prisoner to the Island of Despair, as you call it, where he said he
would keep her until she consented to marry him and would sign over to
him all right to her throne. There she still is if she is alive.

"As for me, the Evil Magician soon found t