Garret and Julie adored him. Their happiest hours were spent in the stable watching Jerry groom him. So it was tragedy for all of them when the White Knight of Fairyland, master of Queen Cliona's horses, saw Micky Joe and ordered him captured and brought back to Fairyland. Micky Joe thought that he was galloping into freedom when he ran away from Miss Pennyfeather and Jerry; he thought that he was off "after his fellows of the wild, unshorn manes, the flowing tails, and the hairy fetlocks, who knew nothing of saddles and harness, but only the call of the curlew in the bogs among the lonely hills."

But under the White Knight in Fairyland his life was far harder than it had been under Miss Pennyfeather and Jerry Healy. How Micky Joe won the race for Queen Cliona and his freedom at the same time is the most exciting part of the story. It is a story that could have come only out of Ireland. Where else could a boy like Garret wake in the night and see "sitting cross-legged on the other side of the geranium pot in the windo'w .. . a little man in a green jacket, a red hat, with a pair of merry green eyes, smiling at him"? This is a well designed book, with the drawings printed in the green of the Irish hills, and made by an artist who understands the soft contours of Ireland and the strangeness of Fairyland.