"Pardon me, Madame. Can you tell me if this street leads to the palace of Princess Ozana?"
"Palace? What's that?" asked the woman with a puzzled expression on her face. "I don't know what a palace is, Sir, but if you follow this street you will come to the cottage where our Princess Ozana dwells."
"Thank you, Madame," said the Wizard, and the little woman trotted busily down the street.
In a few minutes more Dorothy and the Wizard had reached the central part of Pineville. Here a trim, white picket fence encircled a large area that seemed to be one huge flower garden with every sort of flower imaginable growing in it. In the exact center of this enclosure stood an attractive blue cottage, large enough to accommodate comfortably full-sized human beings. Just in front of the cottage was a pond of placid blue water. In the pond grew water lilies and all sorts of flowering plants that one finds in lakes and ponds.
The path that led from the entrance of the cottage divided at the pond's edge and encircled the water, meeting on the opposite side of the pond and running again as a single path to a gate in the fence before which Dorothy and the Wizard stood. Forming a bower over the gate was a white wooden trellis covered with roses. From the center of the pretty trellis hung a blue sign with these words in white enameled letters:
