I gazed at the yellow shoes in amazement, for they certainly did not belong to me, and they had decidedly not been there a short time before, for I had been sitting in the chair myself. I had just got up to examine them, when, to my utter astonishment, I saw a pair of yellow stockings appearing above them; an instant later, a little yellow body; and finally, the quaintest little head that I have ever seen, surmounted by a yellow turban, in the front of which a large jewel sparkled and shone. It was not the turban, however, but the face beneath it which claimed my greatest attention, for the eyes were nearly starting out of the head with fright, and the expression was one of the greatest anxiety. It gave way, however, to reassurance and content directly the little man had given a hurried glance round the room, and he sank comfortably down into "the Toad" with a sigh of relief. "Phew!" he exclaimed, drawing out a little yellow fan from his sleeve and fanning himself vigorously, "that _was_ a narrow squeak! I really don't think that I've been in such a tight corner before for two hundred years at least." And he tucked his fan away again and beamed upon me complacently. I was so astounded at the sudden appearance of this remarkable little personage that for the moment 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.