put the snake down on the floor beside the hole. With an air of offended dignity, the snake slithered into the dark opening. 

 "Now—what's the meeting for?" he demanded. "I'll tell you immediate that if money's required it's impractical." 

 President O'Hanrahan said morbidly: 

 "'Twas called, it seems, to put the curse o' Cromwell on whoever let the black snakes loose. But they'd been cooped up, and they knew they were not keepin' the dinies down, and they got worried over the work they were neglectin'. So they took turns diggin', like prisoners in a penitentiary, and presently they broke out and like the faithful creatures they are they set anxious to work on their backlog of diny-catchin'. Which they're doin'. They've ruined us entirely, but they meant well." 

 The minister of Information asked apprehensively: "What will O'Donohue do when he finds out they're here?" 

 "He's not found out—yet," said the president without elation. "Moira didn't tell him. She's an angel! But he's bound to learn. And then if he doesn't detonate with the rage in him, he'll see to it that all of us are murdered—slowly, for treason to the Erse and blasphemy directed at St. Patrick." Then the president said with a sort of yearning pride: "D'ye know what Moira offered to do? She said she'd taken biology at college, and she'd try to solve the problem of the dinies. The darlin'!" 

 "Bein' gathered together," observed the chief justice, "we might as well try again to think of somethin' plausible." 

 "We need a good shenanigan," agreed the president unhappily. "But what could it be? Has anybody the trace of an idea?" 

 The cabinet went into session. The trouble was, of course, that the Erse colony on Eire was a bust. The first colonists built houses, broke ground, planted crops—and encountered dinies. Large ones, fifty and sixty feet long, with growing families. They had thick bodies with unlikely bony excrescences, they had long necks which ended in very improbable small heads, and they had long tapering tails which would knock over a man or a fence post or the corner of a house, impartially, if they happened to swing that way. They were not bright. 

 That they ate the growing crops might be expected, though cursed. But they ate wire fences. The colonists at first waited for them to die of indigestion. But they digested the fences. Then between bales of 

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