His leprechaun master departed soon after cock-crow as the sun was still rising and casting a faint glow over the frosty grounds and garden. Kyle's small, bare feet crunched on the frozen turf as he carried one of his master's cases to the waiting carriage.
The carriage was a wondrous thing, crafted to the leprechaun's scale, and more amazingly, fitted out with a team of small ponies on harness. The little sprite had taken more time with his attire this morning, obviously wanting to make a good impression on the folks on whom he planned to call throughout the day.
He handed Kyle a long, handwritten list as he stepped into the carriage. "No time for lollygagging," he said and, for punctuating his chiding statement, he smacked Kyle on his increasingly tender backside. As the ponies pulled the carriage to a rolling start, Kyle, his backside still smarting from all the sprite's whacks, stared at the list. His spirits collapsed. He could never hope to accomplish all his chores and search for a way to escape the leprechaun's curse. He trudged back to the leprechaun's dwelling place, made himself a cup of hot tea, and snacked on some of his master's best biscuits.
The hot tea helped his determination rekindle. "It doesn't matter if I do the hateful imp's chores," he reasoned. "If I find what I am looking for, I am out of here."
For the first time since the leprechaun had reduced him into a weak, naked eight-year-old male child, collared and bidden to respond to the imp's every whim, Kyle felt on the brink of reclaiming his life as a successful successful banking executive, envied by his peers and feared by rivals.
Several hours later, an exhausted Kyle became more frantic as his searching had so far yielded no results. He was no closer to locating the hidden pot of gold or anything else that might of use to him. He thought of the book in the leprechaun's library. What if he perused the pages with a little more attention? Might he yet stumble across a secret he could use to his advantage?
The house empty, he didn't have to creep furtively, but he still stole silently into the ominous room. He saw his master's desk, but he tiptoed past it and reached the tall shelves. He retrieved the book, but he didn't want to read it within the oppressive room and carried it with him back into the kitchen, spread it open on the table, and began to thumb through pages. His eyes grew heavy and blurry as page after page yielded nothing useful.
He was about to give up when a page fell open to a drawing of a garden, looking very much like the leprechaun's garden with its cabbages, leeks, and other vegetables. But, what held his attention, was one of the captions beneath the illustrations. The few sentences of text revealed how to disguise a portal to another realm as a cabbage or a gourd. Kyle stared, slack-jawed, at a drawing of a hand pulling a cabbage from the ground and unleashing a shining, shimmering portal. Excited, he closed the book and headed at once out the back door and into the garden.
Compared to his boy's body, which was not quite four feet tall, some of the cabbages growing in the garden were true monsters. Remembering the illustration, Kyle tried to wrap his hands around the stalk at the base of one of the largest cabbages. He pulled, and strained, and groaned, yet failed. The cabbage remained rooted to the spot.
"I'm too small," Kyle whined in his panicked boyish voice. The angle of the sun had changed, and he realized that his capricious master would return within hours, and he had done none of his tasks assigned on the imp's infernally long list.
Kyle tried again. He put his back into the effort, straining until his face turned red, as he strove to uproot the massive cabbage. Suddenly, with an audible pop, the cabbage lost the struggle to stay rooted in the earth, causing Kyle to fall backward on his little boy butt.
When he got back to his feet and dusted off his dirty hands on his bare legs, he gasped at the sight of a shimmering and glowing portal. He gave a shrill cry of joy!
Without any hesitation, he flung himself into the swirling vortex...