The fairy stopped and shivered as he thought of the horrible string of iron. Then he went on: "I followed it and it came into another house, where there was so much iron that I couldn't stay there. But the strings of iron came out of this house and led in all directions. I followed them and I listened everywhere and I found what they were for, though how they do it all I dunno. And it's this way: Anywhere that there's a box you can talk to them that's in the house where all the iron strings go. And if they like to help you, you can talk to anybody else where there's a box. It may be a mile off or it may be a dozen miles off. Many a time those in the house where all the strings are will not help them that wants to talk, but when they will, it's easy. Yes, Your Majesty, one man talks to another ten miles off, as if he was standing by his side."
"Your Majesty," said another fairy, "you saw yourself the bright lights that were at the place where the grass was, that we came to first, and you've seen thousands more of them since. Do you know that they're not candles, and they're not lamps, and that there's no fire to them at all? There's strings of something, whatever it is, from one of them to another, and the light goes through that, whatever it is."
"There's another thing that they do with strings like that," said still another fairy. "I saw men doing it not far from here. They made a hole in a rock and they put one end of a string in it. Then where the other end was, a man pushed a thing like a sort of handle, and the rock was all burst open, and nobody had touched it."
And another fairy said: "Your Majesty, there are boats all the time going across the rivers--across the running water. Of course we always knew that mortals could cross running water, but these boats go without sails or oars, like the ship that we came here on. To be sure I couldn't go on one, because it was across running water, but I went near one, when it was at the shore, and it was all full of iron, and I got the most awful pains from being near it. It was as bad, almost, as I felt coming here, when I'ld get too near the iron sides of the ship."
"And a strange thing it was that I saw too," said another fairy. "I saw people looking into little boxes of wood, so I looked in too. And in one I saw a woman dancing, and in another there were horses running, and in another I saw two men fighting. And it was not a real woman or real horses or real men, but only pictures that moved and did the things that real people and horses would do."