things that are like A B C to the fairies of to-day. For the Welsh
fairies, King Puck and Queen Mab, know all about what is in the
telegraphs, submarine cables and wireless telegraphy of to-day. Puck
would laugh if you should say that a telephone was any new thing to
him. Long ago, in Shakespeare's time, he boasted that he could "put a
girdle round the earth in forty minutes." Men have been trying ever
since to catch up with him, but they have not gone ahead of him yet.

If, only three hundred years ago, this were the case, what must have
been Puck's fun, when he saw men in the early days, working so hard to
make even a clay cup or saucer. These people who slept and ate in cave
boarding-houses, knew nothing of metals, or how to make iron or brass
tools, wire, or machines, or how to touch a button and light up a
whole room, which even a baby can now do.

There is one thing that we, who have traveled in many fairy lands,
have often noticed and told our friends, the little folks, and that is
this:

All the fairies we ever knew are very slow to change either their
opinions, or their ways, or their fashions. Like many mortals, they
think a great deal of their own notions. They imagine that the only
way to do a thing is in that which they say is the right one.

So it came to pass that even when the Cymric folk gave up wearing the
skins of animals, and put on pretty clothes woven on a loom, and ate
out of dishes, instead of clam shells, there were still some fairies
that kept to the notions and fashions of the cave days. To one of
these, came trouble because of this failing.