"We immediately began eating the fruit, and found it so delicious and satisfying that we threw the biscuits into the sea. What was my alarm in two days' time to find that I was growing stupid. I could not get enough sleep. The Queen was the same, and as for the Princess, when she was not eating fruit she was sleeping. We thought it must be the sea air, but on the third day we could hardly open our eyes at all, and as soon as we had eaten some fruit for breakfast we fell sound asleep, and when I woke I looked around in vain for my wife and little daughter. "They were nowhere to be seen. Only beside me were a grey dove and a white one sitting on a branch sound asleep. Then on looking down I saw that I too was sitting on the branch, and that I was a brown dove, and I knew immediately that this was the work of the Evil Magician of Despair, and that it was through eating the charmed fruit that we had become changed into birds. "It was not long before we found that there were many others here, who like ourselves had been sent out of their country. And to make it more horrible I discovered that the longer they stayed and the more fruit they ate the more stupid they became. Some of the older ones could not remember anything at all, and did nothing all day long but eat, drink and sleep. "I do not eat more than will keep me alive, and I try to keep the Queen and our daughter from eating much too, knowing that we also are in danger of losing our minds. I have gone about imploring the others on the island to be careful, in hope of our being at some future time able to escape, but to very little purpose. Of course they must eat the fruit or starve, and most of them prefer losing their minds to going hungry." Prince Daimur listened to the tale with a shiver, for he did not in the least want to be enchanted and lose his mind. "Have you ever seen the Magician?" he asked after a pause. "I have been told he knows many secrets of chemistry." "No," answered the dove. "We have never seen him. We feel that he is coming sometimes by the great wind that goes sweeping by, but as it is always coming and going in the path to the shore I think he must go back and forth a great deal from this island to some of the others. We know that he has a house on the hill on the north side somewhere, but have never been able to get close enough to see it, as the wind is always so strong around the hill that we cannot fly against it." Now all this talk of wind made Daimur think of the day he had found the Good Old Man of Sunne in his cottage with the door blown in, and when he put his hand in his bosom, there safe and sound was his little case with his cap, spectacles and key, which in his distress he had entirely forgotten. He opened the case and putting on the spectacles looked at the dove.