“Oh, no, we should have given the ovation to anyone who had saved any of us from captivity. We love giving ovations. Only we so seldom get the chance, and even ordinary entertaining is difficult. People are so prejudiced. We can hardly ever get anyone to come and visit us. I shouldn’t have got you if you hadn’t happened to find that cave. It would have been quite impossible for me to give Kathleen that clinging embrace from shallow water. The cave water is so much more buoyant than the sea. I daresay you noticed that.” Yes—they had. “May we sit next you at the banquet?” Kathleen asked suddenly, “because, you know, it’s all rather strange to us.” “Of course, dear,” said the sea lady. “But,” said Bernard, “I’m awfully sorry, but I think we ought to go home.” “Oh, don’t talk of it,” said the Mermaid. “Why, you’ve only just come.” Bernard muttered something about getting home in time to wash for tea. “There’ll be heaps of time,” said Francis impatiently; “don’t fuss and spoil everything.” “I’m not fussing,” said Bernard, stolid as ever. “I never fuss. But I think we ought to be thinking of getting home.” “Well, think about it then,” said Francis impatiently, and turned to admire the clusters of scarlet flowers that hung from the pillars of the gallery. The banquet was very magnificent, but they never could remember afterward what it was that they ate out of the silver dishes and drank out of the golden cups. They none of them forgot the footmen, however, who were dressed in tight-fitting suits of silver scales, with silver fingerless gloves, and a sort of helmet on that made them look less like people than like fish, as Kathleen said. “But they _are_ fish,” said the Princess, opening her beautiful eyes; “they’re the Salmoners, and the one behind Mother’s chair is the Grand Salmoner. In your country I have heard there are Grand Almoners. We have Grand Salmoners.” “Are all your servants fish?” Mavis asked. “Of course,” said the Princess, “but we don’t use servants much except for state occasions. Most of our work is done by the lower orders—electric eels, most of them. We get all the power for our machinery from them.” “How do you do it?” Bernard asked, with a fleeting vision of being some day known as the great man who discovered the commercial value of the electricity obtainable from eels. “We keep a tank of them,” said she, “and you just turn a tap—they’re connected up to people’s houses—and you connect them with your looms or lathes or whatever you’re working. That sets up a continuous current and the eels swim around and around in the current till the work’s done. It’s beautifully simple.” “It’s simply beautiful,” said Mavis warmly. “I mean all this.” She waved her hand to the row of white arches through which the green of the garden and the blue of what looked like the sky showed plainly. “And you live down here and do nothing but play all day long? How lovely.”