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The Princess and the Goblin

by George MacDonald

November, 1996  [Etext #708]


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THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN


GEORGE MACDONALD




CONTENTS


1.  Why the Princess Has a Story About Her
2.  The Princess Loses Herself
3.  The Princess and - We Shall See Who
4.  What the Nurse Thought of It
5.  The Princess Lets Well Alone
6.  The Little Miner
7.  The Mines    44
8.  The Goblins
9.  The Hall of the Goblin Palace
10.  The Princess's King-Papa
11.  The Old Lady's Bedroom
12.  A Short Chapter About Curdie
13.  The Cobs' Creatures
14.  That Night Week
15.  Woven and then Spun
16.  The Ring
17.  Springtime
18.  Curdie's Clue
19.  Goblin Counsels
20.  Irene's Clue
21.  The Escape
22.  The Old Lady and Curdie
23.  Curdie and His Mother
24.  Irene Behaves Like a Princess
25.  Curdie Comes to Grief
26.  The Goblin-Miners
27.  The Goblins in the King's House
28.  Curdie's Guide
29.  Masonwork
30.  The King and the Kiss
31.  The Subterranean Waters
32.  The Last Chapter




CHAPTER 1
Why the Princess Has a Story About Her


There was once a little princess whose father was king over a great
country full of mountains and valleys.  His palace was built upon
one of the mountains, and was very grand and beautiful.  The
princess, whose name was Irene, was born there, but she was sent
soon after her birth, because her mother was not very strong, to be
brought up by country people in a large house, half castle, half
farmhouse, on the side of another mountain, about half-way between
its base and its peak.

The princess was a sweet little creature, and at the time my story
begins was about eight years old, I think, but she got older very
fast.  Her face was fair and pretty, with eyes like two bits of
night sky, each with a star dissolved in the blue.  Those eyes you
would have thought must have known they came from there, so often
were they turned up in that direction.  The ceiling of her nursery
was blue, with stars in it, as like the sky as they could make it.
But I doubt if ever she saw the real sky with the stars in it, for
a reason which I had better mention at once.

These mountains were full of hollow places underneath; huge
caverns, and winding ways, some with water running through them,
and some shining with all colours of the rainbow when a light was
taken in.  There would not have been much known about them, had
there not been mines there, great deep pits, with long galleries
and passages running off from them, which had been dug to get at
the ore of which the mountains were full.  In the course of
digging, the miners came upon many of these natural caverns.  A few
of them had far-off openings out on the side of a mountain, or into
a ravine.

Now in these subterranean caverns lived a strange race of beings,
called by some gnomes, by some kobolds, by some goblins.  There was
a legend current in the country that at one time they lived above
ground, and were very like other people.  But for some reason or
other, concerning which there were different legendary theories,
the king had laid what they thought too severe taxes upon them, or
had required observances of them they did not like, or had begun to
treat them with more severity, in some way or other, and impose
stricter laws; and the consequence was that they had all
disappeared from the face of the country.  According to the legend,
however, instead of going to some other country, they had all taken
refuge in the subterranean caverns, whence they never came out but
at night, and then seldom showed themselves in any numbers, and
never to many people at once.  It was only in the least frequented
and most difficult parts of the mountains that they were said to
gather even at night in the open air.  Those who had caught sight
of any of them said that they had greatly altered in the course of
generations; and no wonder, seeing they lived away from the sun, in
cold and wet and dark places.  They were now, not ordinarily ugly,
but either absolutely hideous, or ludicrously grotesque both in
face and form.  There was no invention, they said, of the most
lawless imagination expressed by pen or pencil, that could surpass
the extravagance of their appearance.  But I suspect those who said
so had mistaken some of their animal companions for the goblins
themselves - of which more by and by.  The goblins themselves were
not so far removed from the human as such a description would
imply.  And as they grew misshapen in body they had grown in
knowledge and cleverness, and now were able to do things no mortal
could see the possibility of.  But as they grew in cunning, they
grew in mischief, and their great delight was in every way they
could think of to annoy the people who lived in the open-air storey
above them.  They had enough of affection left for each other to
preserve them from being absolutely cruel for cruelty's sake to
those that came in their way; but still they so heartily cherished
the ancestral grudge against those who occupied their former
possessions and especially against the descendants of the king who
had caused their expulsion, that they sought every opportunity of
tormenting them in ways that were as odd as their inventors; and
although dwarfed and misshapen, they had strength equal to their
cunning.  In the process of time they had got a king and a
government of their own, whose chief business, beyond their own
simple affairs, was to devise trouble for their neighbours.  It
will now be pretty evident why the little princess had never seen
the sky at night.  They were much too afraid of the goblins to let
her out of the house then, even in company with ever so many
attendants; and they had good reason, as we shall see by and by.



CHAPTER 2
The Princess Loses Herself


I have said the Princess Irene was about eight years old when my
story begins.  And this is how it begins.

One very wet day, when the mountain was covered with mist which was
constantly gathering itself together into raindrops, and pouring
down on the roofs of the great old house, whence it fell in a
fringe of water from the eaves all round about it, the princess
could not of course go out.  She got very tired, so tired that even
her toys could no longer amuse her.  You would wonder at that if I
had time to describe to you one half of the toys she had.  But
then, you wouldn't have the toys themselves, and that makes all the
difference: you can't get tired of a thing before you have it.  It
was a picture, though, worth seeing - the princess sitting in the
nursery with the sky ceiling over her head, at a great table
covered with her toys.  If the artist would like to draw this, I
should advise him not to meddle with the toys.  I am afraid of
attempting to describe them, and I think he had better not try to
draw them.  He had better not.  He can do a thousand things I
can't, but I don't think he could draw those toys.  No man could
better make the princess herself than he could, though - leaning
with her back bowed into the back of the chair, her head hanging
down, and her hands in her lap, very miserable as she would say
herself, not even knowing what she would like, except it were to go
out and get thoroughly wet, and catch a particularly nice cold, and
have to go to bed and take gruel.  The next moment after you see
her sitting there, her nurse goes out of the room.

Even that is a change, and the princess wakes up a little, and
looks about her.  Then she tumbles off her chair and runs out of
the door, not the same door the nurse went out of, but one which
opened at the foot of a curious old stair of worm-eaten oak, which
looked as if never anyone had set foot upon it.  She had once
before been up six steps, and that was sufficient reason, in such
a day, for trying to find out what was at the top of it.

Up and up she ran - such a long way it seemed to her! - until she
came to the top of the third flight.  There she found the landing
was the end of a long passage.  Into this she ran.  It was full of
doors on each side.  There were so many that she did not care to
open any, but ran on to the end, where she turned into another
passage, also full of doors.  When she had turned twice more, and
still saw doors and only doors about her, she began to get
frightened.  It was so silent!  And all those doors must hide rooms
with nobody in them!  That was dreadful.  Also the rain made a
great trampling noise on the roof.  She turned and started at full
speed, her little footsteps echoing through the sounds of the rain
- back for the stairs and her safe nursery.  So she thought, but
she had lost herself long ago.  It doesn't follow that she was
lost, because she had lost herself, though.

She ran for some distance, turned several times, and then began to
be afraid.  Very soon she was sure that she had lost the way back.
Rooms everywhere, and no stair!  Her little heart beat as fast as
her little feet ran, and a lump of tears was growing in her throat.
But she was too eager and perhaps too frightened to cry for some
time.  At last her hope failed her.  Nothing but passages and doors
everywhere!  She threw herself on the floor, and burst into a
wailing cry broken by sobs.

She did not cry long, however, for she was as brave as could be
expected of a princess of her age.  After a good cry, she got up,
and brushed the dust from her frock.  Oh, what old dust it was!
Then she wiped her eyes with her hands, for princesses don't always
have their handkerchiefs in their pockets, any more than some other
little girls I know of.  Next, like a true princess, she resolved
on going wisely to work to find her way back: she would walk
through the passages, and look in every direction for the stair.
This she did, but without success.  She went over the same ground
again an again without knowing it, for the passages and doors were
all alike.  At last, in a corner, through a half-open door, she did
see a stair.  But alas! it went the wrong way: instead of going
down, it went up.  Frightened as she was, however, she could not
help wishing to see where yet further the stair could lead.  It was
very narrow, and so steep that she went on like a four-legged
creature on her hands and feet.



CHAPTER 3
The Princess and - We Shall See Who


When she came to the top, she found herself in a little square
place, with three doors, two opposite each other, and one opposite
the top of the stair.  She stood for a moment, without an idea in
her little head what to do next.  But as she stood, she began to
hear a curious humming sound.  Could it be the rain?  No.  It was
much more gentle, and even monotonous than the sound of the rain,
which now she scarcely heard.  The low sweet humming sound went on,
sometimes stopping for a little while and then beginning again.  It
was more like the hum of a very happy bee that had found a rich
well of honey in some globular flower, than anything else I can
think of at this moment.  Where could it come from?  She laid her
ear first to one of the doors to hearken if it was there - then to
another.  When she laid her ear against the third door, there could
be no doubt where it came from: it must be from something in that
room.  What could it be?  She was rather afraid, but her curiosity
was stronger than her fear, and she opened the door very gently and
peeped in.  What do you think she saw?  A very old lady who sat
spinning.

Perhaps you will wonder how the princess could tell that the old
lady was an old lady, when I inform you that not only was she
beautiful, but her skin was smooth and white.  I will tell you
more.  Her hair was combed back from her forehead and face, and
hung loose far down and all over her back.  That is not much like
an old lady - is it?  Ah! but it was white almost as snow.  And
although her face was so smooth, her eyes looked so wise that you
could not have helped seeing she must be old.  The princess, though
she could not have told you why, did think her very old indeed -
quite fifty, she said to herself.  But she was rather older than
that, as you shall hear.

While the princess stared bewildered, with her head just inside the
door, the old lady lifted hers, and said, in a sweet, but old and
rather shaky voice, which mingled very pleasantly with the
continued hum of her wheel:

'Come in, my dear; come in.  I am glad to see you.'

That the princess was a real princess you might see now quite
plainly; for she didn't hang on to the handle of the door, and
stare without moving, as I have known some do who ought to have
been princesses but were only rather vulgar little girls.  She did
as she was told, stepped inside the door at once, and shut it
gently behind her.

'Come to me, my dear,' said the old lady.

And again the princess did as she was told.  She approached the old
lady - rather slowly, I confess - but did not stop until she stood
by her side, and looked up in her face with her blue eyes and the
two melted stars in them.

'Why, what have you been doing with your eyes, child?' asked the
old lady.
'Crying,' answered the princess.

'Why, child?'

'Because I couldn't find my way down again.'

'But you could find your way up.'

'Not at first - not for a long time.'

'But your face is streaked like the back of a zebra.  Hadn't you a
handkerchief to wipe your eyes with?'

'No.'

'Then why didn't you come to me to wipe them for you?'

'Please, I didn't know you were here.  I will next time.'

'There's a good child!' said the old lady.

Then she stopped her wheel, and rose, and, going out of the room,
returned with a little silver basin and a soft white towel, with
which she washed and wiped the bright little face.  And the
princess thought her hands were so smooth and nice!

When she carried away the basin and towel, the little princess
wondered to see how straight and tall she was, for, although she
was so old, she didn't stoop a bit.  She was dressed in black
velvet with thick white heavy-looking lace about it; and on the
black dress her hair shone like silver.  There was hardly any more
furniture in the room than there might have been in that of the
poorest old woman who made her bread by her spinning.  There was no
carpet on the floor - no table anywhere - nothing but the
spinning-wheel and the chair beside it.  When she came back, she
sat down and without a word began her spinning once more, while
Irene, who had never seen a spinning-wheel, stood by her side and
looked on.  When the old lady had got her thread fairly going
again, she said to the princess, but without looking at her:

'Do you know my name, child?'

'No, I don't know it,' answered the princess.

'my name is Irene.'

'That's my name!' cried the princess.

'I know that.  I let you have mine.  I haven't got your name.
You've got mine.'

'How can that be?' asked the princess, bewildered.  'I've always
had my name.'

'Your papa, the king, asked me if I had any objection to your
having it; and, of course, I hadn't.  I let you have it with
pleasure.'

'It was very kind of you to give me your name - and such a pretty
one,' said the princess.

'Oh, not so very kind!' said the old lady.  'A name is one of those
things one can give away and keep all the same.  I have a good many
such things.  Wouldn't you like to know who I am, child?'

'Yes, that I should - very much.'

'I'm your great-great-grandmother,' said the lady.

'What's that?' asked the princess.

'I'm your father's mother's father's mother.'

'Oh, dear! I can't understand that,' said the princess.

'I dare say not.  I didn't expect you would.  But that's no reason
why I shouldn't say it.'

'Oh, no!' answered the princess.

'I will explain it all to you when you are older,' the lady went
on.  'But you will be able to understand this much now: I came here
to take care of you.'

'Is it long since you came?  Was it yesterday?  Or was it today,
because it was so wet that I couldn't get out?'

'I've been here ever since you came yourself.'

'What a long time!' said the princess.  'I don't remember it at
all.'

'No.  I suppose not.'

'But I never saw you before.'

'No.  But you shall see me again.'

'Do you live in this room always?'

'I don't sleep in it.  I sleep on the opposite side of the landing.
I sit here most of the day.'

'I shouldn't like it.  My nursery is much prettier.  You must be a
queen too, if you are my great big grand-mother.'

'Yes, I am a queen.'

'Where is your crown, then?'
'In my bedroom.'

'I should like to see it.'

'You shall some day - not today.'

'I wonder why nursie never told me.'

'Nursie doesn't know.  She never saw me.'

'But somebody knows that you are in the house?'

'No; nobody.'

'How do you get your dinner, then?'

'I keep poultry - of a sort.'

'Where do you keep them?'

'I will show you.'

'And who makes the chicken broth for you?'

'I never kill any of MY chickens.'

'Then I can't understand.'

'What did you have for breakfast this morning?' asked the lady.

'Oh! I had bread and milk, and an egg - I dare say you eat their
eggs.'

'Yes, that's it.  I eat their eggs.'

'Is that what makes your hair so white?'

'No, my dear.  It's old age.  I am very old.'

'I thought so.  Are you fifty?'

'Yes - more than that.'

'Are you a hundred?'

'Yes - more than that.  I am too old for you to guess.  Come and
see my chickens.'

Again she stopped her spinning.  She rose, took the princess by the
hand, led her out of the room, and opened the door opposite the
stair.  The princess expected to see a lot of hens and chickens,
but instead of that, she saw the blue sky first, and then the roofs
of the house, with a multitude of the loveliest pigeons, mostly
white, but of all colours, walking about, making bows to each
other, and talking a language she could not understand.  She
clapped her hands with delight, and up rose such a flapping of
wings that she in her turn was startled.

'You've frightened my poultry,' said the old lady, smiling.

'And they've frightened me,' said the princess, smiling too.  'But
what very nice poultry!  Are the eggs nice?'

'Yes, very nice.'
'What a small egg-spoon you must have!  Wouldn't it be better to
keep hens, and get bigger eggs?'

'How should I feed them, though?'

'I see,' said the princess.  'The pigeons feed themselves.  They've
got wings.'

'Just so.  If they couldn't fly, I couldn't eat their eggs.'

'But how do you get at the eggs?  Where are their nests?'

The lady took hold of a little loop of string in the wall at the
side of the door and, lifting a shutter, showed a great many
pigeon-holes with nests, some with young ones and some with eggs in
them.  The birds came in at the other side, and she took out the
eggs on this side.  She closed it again quickly, lest the young
ones should be frightened.

'Oh, what a nice way!' cried the princess.  'Will you give me an
egg to eat?  I'm rather hungry.'

'I will some day, but now you must go back, or nursie will be
miserable about you.  I dare say she's looking for you everywhere.'

'Except here,' answered the princess.  'Oh, how surprised she will
be when I tell her about my great big grand-grand-mother!'

'Yes, that she will!' said the old lady with a curious smile.
'Mind you tell her all about it exactly.'

'That I will.  Please will you take me back to her?'

'I can't go all the way, but I will take you to the top of the
stair, and then you must run down quite fast into your own room.'

The little princess put her hand in the old lady's, who, looking
this way and that, brought her to the top of the first stair, and
thence to the bottom of the second, and did not leave her till she
saw her half-way down the third.  When she heard the cry of her
nurse's pleasure at finding her, she turned and walked up the
stairs again, very fast indeed for such a very great grandmother,
and sat down to her spinning with another strange smile on her
sweet old face.

About this spinning of hers I will tell you more another time.

Guess what she was spinning.



CHAPTER 4
What the Nurse Thought of It

'Why, where can you have been, princess?' asked the nurse, taking
her in her arms.  'It's very unkind of you to hide away so long.
I began to be afraid -' Here she checked herself.

'What were you afraid of, nursie?' asked the princess.

'Never mind,' she answered.  'Perhaps I will tell you another day.
Now tell me where you have been.'

'I've been up a long way to see my very great, huge, old
grandmother,' said the princess.

'What do you mean by that?' asked the nurse, who thought she was
making fun.

'I mean that I've been a long way up and up to see My GREAT
grandmother.  Ah, nursie, you don't know what a beautiful mother of
grandmothers I've got upstairs.  She is such an old lady, with such
lovely white hair - as white as my silver cup.  Now, when I think
of it, I think her hair must be silver.'

'What nonsense you are talking, princess!' said the nurse.

'I'm not talking nonsense,' returned Irene, rather offended.  'I
will tell you all about her.  She's much taller than you, and much
prettier.'

'Oh, I dare say!' remarked the nurse.

'And she lives upon pigeons' eggs.'

'Most likely,' said the nurse.

'And she sits in an empty room, spin-spinning all day long.'

'Not a doubt of it,' said the nurse.

'And she keeps her crown in her bedroom.'

'Of course - quite the proper place to keep her crown in.  She
wears it in bed, I'll be bound.'
'She didn't say that.  And I don't think she does.  That wouldn't
be comfortable - would it?  I don't think my papa wears his crown
for a night-cap.  Does he, nursie?'

'I never asked him.  I dare say he does.'

'And she's been there ever since I came here - ever so many years.'

'Anybody could have told you that,' said the nurse, who did not
believe a word Irene was saying.

'Why didn't you tell me, then?'

'There was no necessity.  You could make it all up for yourself.'

'You don't believe me, then!' exclaimed the princess, astonished
and angry, as she well might be.

'Did you expect me to believe you, princess?' asked the nurse
coldly.  'I know princesses are in the habit of telling
make-believes, but you are the first I ever heard of who expected
to have them believed,' she added, seeing that the child was
strangely in earnest.

The princess burst into tears.

'Well, I must say,' remarked the nurse, now thoroughly vexed with
her for crying, 'it is not at all becoming in a princess to tell
stories and expect to be believed just because she is a princess.'

'But it's quite true, I tell you.'

'You've dreamt it, then, child.'

'No, I didn't dream it.  I went upstairs, and I lost myself, and if
I hadn't found the beautiful lady, I should never have found
myself.'

'Oh, I dare say!'

'Well, you just come up with me, and see if I'm not telling the
truth.'

'Indeed I have other work to do.  It's your dinnertime, and I won't
have any more such nonsense.'

The princess wiped her eyes, and her face grew so hot that they
were soon quite dry.  She sat down to her dinner, but ate next to
nothing.  Not to be believed does not at all agree with princesses:
for a real princess cannot tell a lie.  So all the afternoon she
did not speak a word.  Only when the nurse spoke to her, she
answered her, for a real princess is never rude - even when she
does well to be offended.

Of course the nurse was not comfortable in her mind - not that she
suspected the least truth in Irene's story, but that she loved her
dearly, and was vexed with herself for having been cross to her.
She thought her crossness was the cause of the princess's
unhappiness, and had no idea that she was really and deeply hurt at
not being believed.  But, as it became more and more plain during
the evening in her every motion and look, that, although she tried
to amuse herself with her toys, her heart was too vexed and
troubled to enjoy them, her nurse's discomfort grew and grew.  When
bedtime came, she undressed and laid her down, but the child,
instead of holding up her little mouth to be kissed, turned away
from her and lay still.  Then nursie's heart gave way altogether,
and she began to cry.  At the sound of her first sob the princess
turned again, and held her face to kiss her as usual.  But the
nurse had her handkerchief to her eyes, and did not see the
movement.

'Nursie,' said the princess, 'why won't you believe me?'

'Because I can't believe you,' said the nurse, getting angry again.

'Ah! then, you can't help it,' said Irene, 'and I will not be vexed
with you any more.  I will give you a kiss and go to sleep.'

'You little angel!' cried the nurse, and caught her out of bed, and
walked about the room with her in her arms, kissing and hugging
her.

'You will let me take you to see my dear old great big grandmother,
won't you?' said the princess, as she laid her down again.

'And you won't say I'm ugly, any more - will you, princess?'
'Nursie, I never said you were ugly.  What can you mean?'

'Well, if you didn't say it, you meant it.'

'Indeed, I never did.'

'You said I wasn't so pretty as that -'

'As my beautiful grandmother - yes, I did say that; and I say it
again, for it's quite true.'

'Then I do think you are unkind!' said the nurse, and put her
handkerchief to her eyes again.

'Nursie, dear, everybody can't be as beautiful as every other body,
you know.  You are very nice-looking, but if you had been as
beautiful as my grandmother -'

'Bother your grandmother!' said the nurse.

'Nurse, that's very rude.  You are not fit to be spoken to till you
can behave better.'
The princess turned away once more, and again the nurse was ashamed
of herself.

'I'm sure I beg your pardon, princess,' she said, though still in
an offended tone.  But the princess let the tone pass, and heeded
only the words.

'You won't say it again, I am sure,' she answered, once more
turning towards her nurse.  'I was only going to say that if you
had been twice as nice-looking as you are, some king or other would
have married you, and then what would have become of me?'

'You are an angel!' repeated the nurse, again embracing her.
'Now,' insisted Irene, 'you will come and see my grandmother -
won't you?'

'I will go with you anywhere you like, my cherub,' she answered;
and in two minutes the weary little princess was fast asleep.



CHAPTER 5
The Princess Lets Well Alone


When she woke the next morning, the first thing she heard was the
rain still falling.  Indeed, this day was so like the last that it
would have been difficult to tell where was the use of It.  The
first thing she thought of, however, was not the rain, but the lady
in the tower; and the first question that occupied her thoughts was
whether she should not ask the nurse to fulfil her promise this
very morning, and go with her to find her grandmother as soon as
she had had her breakfast.  But she came to the conclusion that
perhaps the lady would not be pleased if she took anyone to see her
without first asking leave; especially as it was pretty evident,
seeing she lived on pigeons' eggs, and cooked them herself, that
she did not want the household to know she was there.  So the
princess resolved to take the first opportunity of running up alone
and asking whether she might bring her nurse.  She believed the
fact that she could not otherwise convince her she was telling the
truth would have much weight with her grandmother.

The princess and her nurse were the best of friends all
dressing-time, and the princess in consequence ate an enormous
little breakfast.

'I wonder, Lootie' - that was her pet name for her nurse - 'what
pigeons' eggs taste like?' she said, as she was eating her egg -
not quite a common one, for they always picked out the pinky ones
for her.

'We'll get you a pigeon's egg, and you shall judge for yourself,'
said the nurse.
'Oh, no, no!' returned Irene, suddenly reflecting they might
disturb the old lady in getting it, and that even if they did not,
she would have one less in consequence.

'What a strange creature you are,' said the nurse - 'first to want
a thing and then to refuse it!'

But she did not say it crossly, and the princess never minded any
remarks that were not unfriendly.

'Well, you see, Lootie, there are reasons,' she returned, and said
no more, for she did not want to bring up the subject of their
former strife, lest her nurse should offer to go before she had had
her grandmother's permission to bring her.  Of course she could
refuse to take her, but then she would believe her less than ever.

Now the nurse, as she said herself afterwards, could not be every
moment in the room; and as never before yesterday had the princess
given her the smallest reason for anxiety, it had not yet come into
her head to watch her more closely.  So she soon gave her a chance,
and, the very first that offered, Irene was off and up the stairs
again.

This day's adventure, however, did not turn out like yesterday's,
although it began like it; and indeed to- day is very seldom like
yesterday, if people would note the differences - even when it
rains.  The princess ran through passage after passage, and could
not find the stair of the tower.  My own suspicion is that she had
not gone up high enough, and was searching on the second instead of
the third floor.  When she turned to go back, she failed equally in
her search after the stair.  She was lost once more.

Something made it even worse to bear this time, and it was no
wonder that she cried again.  Suddenly it occurred to her that it
was after having cried before that she had found her grandmother's
stair.  She got up at once, wiped her eyes, and started upon a
fresh quest.

This time, although she did not find what she hoped, she found what
was next best: she did not come on a stair that went up, but she
came upon one that went down.  It was evidently not the stair she
had come up, yet it was a good deal better than none; so down she
went, and was singing merrily before she reached the bottom.
There, to her surprise, she found herself in the kitchen.  Although
she was not allowed to go there alone, her nurse had often taken
her, and she was a great favourite with the servants.  So there was
a general rush at her the moment she appeared, for every one wanted
to have her; and the report of where she was soon reached the
nurse's ears.  She came at once to fetch her; but she never
suspected how she had got there, and the princess kept her own
counsel.

Her failure to find the old lady not only disappointed her, but
made her very thoughtful.  Sometimes she came almost to the nurse's
opinion that she had dreamed all about her; but that fancy never
lasted very long.  She wondered much whether she should ever see
her again, and thought it very sad not to have been able to find
her when she particularly wanted her.  She resolved to say nothing
more to her nurse on the subject, seeing it was so little in her
power to prove her words.



CHAPTER 6
The Little Miner


The next day the great cloud still hung over the mountain, and the
rain poured like water from a full sponge.  The princess was very
fond of being out of doors, and she nearly cried when she saw that
the weather was no better.  But the mist was not of such a dark
dingy grey; there was light in it; and as the hours went on it grew
brighter and brighter, until it was almost too brilliant to look
at; and late in the afternoon the sun broke out so gloriously that
Irene clapped her hands, crying:

'See, see, Lootie!  The sun has had his face washed.  Look how
bright he is!  Do get my hat, and let us go out for a walk.  Oh,
dear! oh, dear! how happy I am!'

Lootie was very glad to please the princess.  She got her hat and
cloak, and they set out together for a walk up the mountain; for
the road was so hard and steep that the water could not rest upon
it, and it was always dry enough for walking a few minutes after
the rain ceased.  The clouds were rolling away in broken pieces,
like great, overwoolly sheep, whose wool the sun had bleached till
it was almost too white for the eyes to bear.  Between them the sky
shone with a deeper and purer blue, because of the rain.  The trees
on the roadside were hung all over with drops, which sparkled in
the sun like jewels.  The only things that were no brighter for the
rain were the brooks that ran down the mountain; they had changed
from the clearness of crystal to a muddy brown; but what they lost
in colour they gained in sound - or at least in noise, for a brook
when it is swollen is not so musical as before.  But Irene was in
raptures with the great brown streams tumbling down everywhere; and
Lootie shared in her delight, for she too had been confined to the
house for three days.

At length she observed that the sun was getting low, and said it
was time to be going back.  She made the remark again and again,
but, every time, the princess begged her to go on just a little
farther and a little farther; reminding her that it was much easier
to go downhill, and saying that when they did turn they would be at
home in a moment.  So on and on they did go, now to look at a group
of ferns over whose tops a stream was pouring in a watery arch, now
to pick a shining stone from a rock by the wayside, now to watch
the flight of some bird.  Suddenly the shadow of a great mountain
peak came up from behind, and shot in front of them.  When the
nurse saw it, she started and shook, and catching hold of the
princess's hand turned and began to run down the hill.

'What's all the haste, nursie?' asked Irene, running alongside of
her.

'We must not be out a moment longer.'

'But we can't help being out a good many moments longer.'

It was too true.  The nurse almost cried.  They were much too far
from home.  It was against express orders to be out with the
princess one moment after the sun was down; and they were nearly a
mile up the mountain!  If His Majesty, Irene's papa, were to hear
of it, Lootie would certainly be dismissed; and to leave the
princess would break her heart.  It was no wonder she ran.  But
Irene was not in the least frightened, not knowing anything to be
frightened at.  She kept on chattering as well as she could, but it
was not easy.

'Lootie! Lootie! why do you run so fast?  It shakes my teeth when
I talk.'

'Then don't talk,' said Lootie.

'But the princess went on talking.  She was always saying: 'Look,
look, Lootie!' but Lootie paid no more heed to anything she said,
only ran on.

'Look, look, Lootie!  Don't you see that funny man peeping over the
rock?'

Lootie only ran the faster.  They had to pass the rock, and when
they came nearer, the princess saw it was only a lump of the rock
itself that she had taken for a man.

'Look, look, Lootie!  There's such a curious creature at the foot
of that old tree.  Look at it, Lootie!  It's making faces at us, I
do think.'

Lootie gave a stifled cry, and ran faster still - so fast that
Irene's little legs could not keep up with her, and she fell with
a crash.  It was a hard downhill road, and she had been running
very fast - so it was no wonder she began to cry.  This put the
nurse nearly beside herself; but all she could do was to run on,
the moment she got the princess on her feet again.

'Who's that laughing at me?' said the princess, trying to keep in
her sobs, and running too fast for her grazed knees.

'Nobody, child,' said the nurse, almost angrily.

But that instant there came a burst of coarse tittering from
somewhere near, and a hoarse indistinct voice that seemed to say:
'Lies! lies! lies!'

'Oh!' cried the nurse with a sigh that was almost a scream, and ran
on faster than ever.

'Nursie! Lootie! I can't run any more.  Do let us walk a bit.'

'What am I to do?' said the nurse.  'Here, I will carry you.'

She caught her up; but found her much too heavy to run with, and
had to set her down again.  Then she looked wildly about her, gave
a great cry, and said:

'We've taken the wrong turning somewhere, and I don't know where we
are.  We are lost, lost!'

The terror she was in had quite bewildered her.  It was true enough
they had lost the way.  They had been running down into a little
valley in which there was no house to be seen.

Now Irene did not know what good reason there was for her nurse's
terror, for the servants had all strict orders never to mention the
goblins to her, but it was very discomposing to see her nurse in
such a fright.  Before, however, she had time to grow thoroughly
alarmed like her, she heard the sound of whistling, and that
revived her.  Presently she saw a boy coming up the road from the
valley to meet them.  He was the whistler; but before they met his
whistling changed to singing.  And this is something like what he
sang:


'Ring! dod! bang!
Go the hammers' clang!
Hit and turn and bore!
Whizz and puff and roar!
Thus we rive the rocks,
Force the goblin locks.  -
See the shining ore!
One, two, three -
Bright as gold can be!
Four, five, six -
Shovels, mattocks, picks!
Seven, eight, nine -
Light your lamp at mine.
Ten, eleven, twelve -
Loosely hold the helve.
We're the merry miner-boys,
Make the goblins hold their noise.'


'I wish YOU would hold your noise,' said the nurse rudely, for the
very word GOBLIN at such a time and in such a place made her
tremble.  It would bring the goblins upon them to a certainty, she
thought, to defy them in that way.  But whether the boy heard her
or not, he did not stop his singing.


'Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen -
This is worth the siftin';
Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen -
There's the match, and lay't in.
Nineteen, twenty -
Goblins in a plenty.'


'Do be quiet,' cried the nurse, in a whispered shriek.  But the
boy, who was now close at hand, still went on.

'Hush! scush! scurry!
There you go in a hurry!
Gobble! gobble! goblin!
There you go a wobblin';
Hobble, hobble, hobblin' -
Cobble! cobble! cobblin'!
Hob-bob-goblin! -
Huuuuuh!'


'There!' said the boy, as he stood still opposite them.  'There!
that'll do for them.  They can't bear singing, and they can't stand
that song.  They can't sing themselves, for they have no more voice
than a crow; and they don't like other people to sing.'

The boy was dressed in a miner's dress, with a curious cap on his
head.  He was a very nice-looking boy, with eyes as dark as the
mines in which he worked and as sparkling as the crystals in their
rocks.  He was about twelve years old.  His face was almost too
pale for beauty, which came of his being so little in the open air
and the sunlight - for even vegetables grown in the dark are white;
but he looked happy, merry indeed - perhaps at the thought of
having routed the goblins; and his bearing as he stood before them
had nothing clownish or rude about it.

'I saw them,' he went on, 'as I came up; and I'm very glad I did.
I knew they were after somebody, but I couldn't see who it was.
They won't touch you so long as I'm with you.'

'Why, who are you?' asked the nurse, offended at the freedom with
which he spoke to them.

'I'm Peter's son.'

'Who's Peter?'

'Peter the miner.'

'I don't know him.'
'I'm his son, though.'

'And why should the goblins mind you, pray?'

'Because I don't mind them.  I'm used to them.'

'What difference does that make?'

'If you're not afraid of them, they're afraid of you.  I'm not
afraid of them.  That's all.  But it's all that's wanted - up here,
that is.  It's a different thing down there.  They won't always
mind that song even, down there.  And if anyone sings it, they
stand grinning at him awfully; and if he gets frightened, and
misses a word, or says a wrong one, they - oh! don't they give it
him!'
'What do they do to him?' asked Irene, with a trembling voice.

'Don't go frightening the princess,' said the nurse.

'The princess!' repeated the little miner, taking off his curious
cap.  'I beg your pardon; but you oughtn't to be out so late.
Everybody knows that's against the law.'

'Yes, indeed it is!' said the nurse, beginning to cry again.  'And
I shall have to suffer for it.'

'What does that matter?' said the boy.  'It must be your fault.  It
is the princess who will suffer for it.  I hope they didn't hear
you call her the princess.  If they did, they're sure to know her
again: they're awfully sharp.'

'Lootie! Lootie!' cried the princess.  'Take me home.'

'Don't go on like that,' said the nurse to the boy, almost
fiercely.  'How could I help it?  I lost my way.'

'You shouldn't have been out so late.  You wouldn't have lost your
way if you hadn't been frightened,' said the boy.  'Come along.
I'll soon set you right again.  Shall I carry your little
Highness?'

'Impertinence!' murmured the nurse, but she did not say it aloud,
for she thought if she made him angry he might take his revenge by
telling someone belonging to the house, and then it would be sure
to come to the king's ears.  'No, thank you,' said Irene.  'I can
walk very well, though I can't run so fast as nursie.  If you will
give me one hand, Lootie will give me another, and then I shall get
on famously.'

They soon had her between them, holding a hand of each.

'Now let's run,' said the nurse.

'No, no!' said the little miner.  'That's the worst thing you can
do.  If you hadn't run before, you would not have lost your way.
And if you run now, they will be after you in a moment.'

'I don't want to run,' said Irene.

'You don't think of me,' said the nurse.

'Yes, I do, Lootie.  The boy says they won't touch us if we don't
run.'

'Yes, but if they know at the house that I've kept you out so late
I shall be turned away, and that would break my heart.'

'Turned away, Lootie!  Who would turn you away?'

'Your papa, child.'

'But I'll tell him it was all my fault.  And you know it was,
Lootie.'

'He won't mind that.  I'm sure he won't.'

'Then I'll cry, and go down on my knees to him, and beg him not to
take away my own dear Lootie.'

The nurse was comforted at hearing this, and said no more.  They
went on, walking pretty fast, but taking care not to run a step.

'I want to talk to you,' said Irene to the little miner; 'but it's
so awkward!  I don't know your name.'

'My name's Curdie, little princess.'

'What a funny name! Curdie!  What more?'

'Curdie Peterson.  What's your name, please?'

'Irene.'

'What more?'

'I don't know what more.  What more is my name, Lootie?'

'Princesses haven't got more than one name.  They don't want it.'

'Oh, then, Curdie, you must call me just Irene and no more.'

'No, indeed,' said the nurse indignantly.  'He shall do no such
thing.'

'What shall he call me, then, Lootie?'

'Your Royal Highness.'
'My Royal Highness!  What's that?  No, no, Lootie.  I won't be
called names.  I don't like them.  You told me once yourself it's
only rude children that call names; and I'm sure Curdie wouldn't be
rude.  Curdie, my name's Irene.'

'Well, Irene,' said Curdie, with a glance at the nurse which showed
he enjoyed teasing her; 'it is very kind of you to let me call you
anything.  I like your name very much.'

He expected the nurse to interfere again; but he soon saw that she
was too frightened to speak.  She was staring at something a few
yards before them in the middle of the path, where it narrowed
between rocks so that only one could pass at a time.

'It is very much kinder of you to go out of your way to take us
home,' said Irene.
'I'm not going out of my way yet,' said Curdie.  'It's on the other
side of those rocks the path turns off to my father's.'

'You wouldn't think of leaving us till we're safe home, I'm sure,'
gasped the nurse.

'Of course not,' said Curdie.

'You dear, good, kind Curdie!  I'll give you a kiss when we get
home,' said the princess.

The nurse gave her a great pull by the hand she held.  But at that
instant the something in the middle of the way, which had looked
like a great lump of earth brought down by the rain, began to move.
One after another it shot out four long things, like two arms and
two legs, but it was now too dark to tell what they were.  The
nurse began to tremble from head to foot.  Irene clasped Curdie's
hand yet faster, and Curdie began to sing again:


'One, two -
Hit and hew!
Three, four -
Blast and bore!
Five, six -
There's a fix!
Seven, eight -
Hold it straight!
Nine, ten -
Hit again!
Hurry! scurry!
Bother! smother!
There's a toad
In the road!
Smash it!
Squash it!
Fry it!
Dry it!
You're another!
Up and off!
There's enough! -
Huuuuuh!'


As he uttered the last words, Curdie let go his hold of his
companion, and rushed at the thing in the road as if he would
trample it under his feet.  It gave a great spring, and ran
straight up one of the rocks like a huge spider.  Curdie turned
back laughing, and took Irene's hand again.  She grasped his very
tight, but said nothing till they had passed the rocks.  A few
yards more and she found herself on a part of the road she knew,
and was able to speak again.

'Do you know, Curdie, I don't quite like your song: it sounds to me
rather rude,' she said.

'Well, perhaps it is,' answered Curdie.  'I never thought of that;
it's a way we have.  We do it because they don't like it.'

'Who don't like it?'

'The cobs, as we call them.'

'Don't!' said the nurse.

'Why not?' said Curdie.

'I beg you won't.  Please don't.'

'Oh! if you ask me that way, of course, I won't; though I don't a
bit know why.  Look! there are the lights of your great house down
below.  You'll be at home in five minutes now.'

Nothing more happened.  They reached home in safety.  Nobody had
missed them, or even known they had gone out; and they arrived at
the door belonging to their part of the house without anyone seeing
them.  The nurse was rushing in with a hurried and not
over-gracious good night to Curdie; but the princess pulled her
hand from hers, and was just throwing her arms round Curdie's neck,
when she caught her again and dragged her away.

'Lootie! Lootie! I promised a kiss,' cried Irene.

'A princess mustn't give kisses.  It's not at all proper,' said
Lootie.

'But I promised,' said the princess.

'There's no occasion; he's only a miner-boy.'

'He's a good boy, and a brave boy, and he has been very kind to us.
Lootie! Lootie! I promised.'

'Then you shouldn't have promised.'

'Lootie, I promised him a kiss.'

'Your Royal Highness,' said Lootie, suddenly grown very respectful,
'must come in directly.'

'Nurse, a princess must not break her word,' said Irene, drawing
herself up and standing stock-still.

Lootie did not know which the king might count the worst - to let
the princess be out after sunset, or to let her kiss a miner-boy.
She did not know that, being a gentleman, as many kings have been,
he would have counted neither of them the worse.  However much he
might have disliked his daughter to kiss the miner-boy, he would
not have had her break her word for all the goblins in creation.
But, as I say, the nurse was not lady enough to understand this,
and so she was in a great difficulty, for, if she insisted, someone
might hear the princess cry and run to see, and then all would come
out.  But here Curdie came again to the rescue.

'Never mind, Princess Irene,' he said.  'You mustn't kiss me
tonight.  But you shan't break your word.  I will come another
time.  You may be sure I will.'

'Oh, thank you, Curdie!' said the princess, and stopped crying.

'Good night, Irene; good night, Lootie,' said Curdie, and turned
and was out of sight in a moment.

'I should like to see him!' muttered the nurse, as she carried the
princess to the nursery.

'You will see him,' said Irene.  'You may be sure Curdie will keep
his word.  He's sure to come again.'

'I should like to see him!' repeated the nurse, and said no more.
She did not want to open a new cause of strife with the princess
by saying more plainly what she meant.  Glad enough that she had
succeeded both in getting home unseen, and in keeping the princess
from kissing the miner's boy, she resolved to watch her far better
in future.  Her carelessness had already doubled the danger she was
in.  Formerly the goblins were her only fear; now she had to
protect her charge from Curdie as well.



CHAPTER 7
The Mines


Curdie went home whistling.  He resolved to say nothing about the
princess for fear of getting the nurse into trouble, for while he
enjoyed teasing her because of her absurdity, he was careful not to
do her any harm.  He saw no more of the goblins, and was soon fast
asleep in his bed.

He woke in the middle of the night, and thought he heard curious
noises outside.  He sat up and listened; then got up, and, opening
the door very quietly, went out.  When he peeped round the corner,
he saw, under his own window, a group of stumpy creatures, whom he
at once recognized by their shape.  Hardly, however, had he begun
his 'One, two, three!' when they broke asunder, scurried away, and
were out of sight.  He returned laughing, got into bed again, and
was fast asleep in a moment.

Reflecting a little over the matter in the morning, he came to the
conclusion that, as nothing of the kind had ever happened before,
they must be annoyed with him for interfering to protect the
princess.  By the time he was dressed, however, he was thinking of
something quite different, for he did not value the enmity of the
goblins in the least.  As soon as they had had breakfast, he set
off with his father for the mine.

They entered the hill by a natural opening under a huge rock, where
a little stream rushed out.  They followed its course for a few
yards, when the passage took a turn, and sloped steeply into the
heart of the hill.  With many angles and windings and
branchings-off, and sometimes with steps where it came upon a
natural gulf, it led them deep into the hill before they arrived at
the place where they were at present digging out the precious ore.
This was of various kinds, for the mountain was very rich in the
better sorts of metals.  With flint and steel, and tinder-box, they
lighted their lamps, then fixed them on their heads, and were soon
hard at work with their pickaxes and shovels and hammers.  Father
and son were at work near each other, but not in the same gang -
the passages out of which the ore was dug, they called gangs - for
when the lode, or vein of ore, was small, one miner would have to
dig away alone in a passage no bigger than gave him just room to
work - sometimes in uncomfortable cramped positions.  If they
stopped for a moment they could hear everywhere around them, some
nearer, some farther off, the sounds of their companions burrowing
away in all directions in the inside of the great mountain - some
boring holes in the rock in order to blow it up with gunpowder,
others shovelling the broken ore into baskets to be carried to the
mouth of the mine, others hitting away with their pickaxes.
Sometimes, if the miner was in a very lonely part, he would hear
only a tap-tapping, no louder than that of a woodpecker, for the
sound would come from a great distance off through the solid
mountain rock.

The work was hard at best, for it is very warm underground; but it
was not particularly unpleasant, and some of the miners, when they
wanted to earn a little more money for a particular purpose, would
stop behind the rest and work all night.  But you could not tell
night from day down there, except from feeling tired and sleepy;
for no light of the sun ever came into those gloomy regions.  Some
who had thus remained behind during the night, although certain
there were none of their companions at work, would declare the next
morning that they heard, every time they halted for a moment to
take breath, a tap-tapping all about them, as if the mountain were
then more full of miners than ever it was during the day; and some
in consequence would never stay overnight, for all knew those were
the sounds of the goblins.  They worked only at night, for the
miners' night was the goblins' day.  Indeed, the greater number of
the miners were afraid of the goblins; for there were strange
stories well known amongst them of the treatment some had received
whom the goblins had surprised at their work during the night.  The
more courageous of them, however, amongst them Peter Peterson and
Curdie, who in this took after his father, had stayed in the mine
all night again and again, and although they had several times
encountered a few stray goblins, had never yet failed in driving
them away.  As I have indicated already, the chief defence against
them was verse, for they hated verse of every kind, and some kinds
they could not endure at all.  I suspect they could not make any
themselves, and that was why they disliked it so much.  At all
events, those who were most afraid of them were those who could
neither make verses themselves nor remember the verses that other
people made for them; while those who were never afraid were those
who could make verses for themselves; for although there were
certain old rhymes which were very effectual, yet it was well known
that a new rhyme, if of the right sort, was even more distasteful
to them, and therefore more effectual in putting them to flight.

Perhaps my readers may be wondering what the goblins could be
about, working all night long, seeing they never carried up the ore
and sold it; but when I have informed them concerning what Curdie
learned the very next night, they will be able to understand.

For Curdie had determined, if his father would permit him, to
remain there alone this night - and that for two reasons: first, he
wanted to get extra wages that he might buy a very warm red
petticoat for his mother, who had begun to complain of the cold of
the mountain air sooner than usual this autumn; and second, he had
just a faint hope of finding out what the goblins were about under
his window the night before.

When he told his father, he made no objection, for he had great
confidence in his boy's courage and resources.

'I'm sorry I can't stay with you,' said Peter; 'but I want to go
and pay the parson a visit this evening, and besides I've had a bit
of a headache all day.'

'I'm sorry for that, father,' said Curdie.

'Oh, it's not much.  You'll be sure to take care of yourself, won't
you?'

'Yes, father; I will.  I'll keep a sharp look-out, I promise you.'
Curdie was the only one who remained in the mine.  About six
o'clock the rest went away, everyone bidding him good night, and
telling him to take care of himself; for he was a great favourite
with them all.

'Don't forget your rhymes,' said one.

'No, no,'answered Curdie.

'It's no matter if he does,' said another, 'for he'll only have to
make a new one.'

'Yes: but he mightn't be able to make it fast enough,' said
another; 'and while it was cooking in his head, they might take a
mean advantage and set upon him.'

'I'll do my best,' said Curdie.  'I'm not afraid.'
'We all know that,' they returned, and left him.



CHAPTER 8
The Goblins


For some time Curdie worked away briskly, throwing all the ore he
had disengaged on one side behind him, to be ready for carrying out
in the morning.  He heard a good deal of goblin-tapping, but it all
sounded far away in the hill, and he paid it little heed.  Towards
midnight he began to feel rather hungry; so he dropped his pickaxe,
got out a lump of bread which in the morning he had laid in a damp
hole in the rock, sat down on a heap of ore, and ate his supper.
Then he leaned back for five minutes' rest before beginning his
work again, and laid his head against the rock.  He had not kept
the position for one minute before he heard something which made
him sharpen his ears.  It sounded like a voice inside the rock.
After a while he heard it again.  It was a goblin voice - there
could be no doubt about that - and this time he could make out the
words.

'Hadn't we better be moving?'it said.

A rougher and deeper voice replied:

'There's no hurry.  That wretched little mole won't be through
tonight, if he work ever so hard.  He's not by any means at the
thinnest place.'

'But you still think the lode does come through into our house?'
said the first voice.

'Yes, but a good bit farther on than he has got to yet.  If he had
struck a stroke more to the side just here,' said the goblin,
tapping the very stone, as it seemed to Curdie, against which his
head lay, 'he would have been through; but he's a couple of yards
past it now, and if he follow the lode it will be a week before it
leads him in.  You see it back there - a long way.  Still, perhaps,
in case of accident it would be as well to be getting out of this.
Helfer, you'll take the great chest.  That's your business, you
know.'

'Yes, dad,' said a third voice.  'But you must help me to get it on
my back.  It's awfully heavy, you know.'

'Well, it isn't just a bag of smoke, I admit.  But you're as strong
as a mountain, Helfer.'

'You say so, dad.  I think myself I'm all right.  But I could carry
ten times as much if it wasn't for my feet.'

'That is your weak point, I confess, my boy.'
'Ain't it yours too, father?'

'Well, to be honest, it's a goblin weakness.  Why they come so
soft, I declare I haven't an idea.'

'Specially when your head's so hard, you know, father.'

'Yes my boy.  The goblin's glory is his head.  To think how the
fellows up above there have to put on helmets and things when they
go fighting!  Ha! ha!'

'But why don't we wear shoes like them, father?  I should like it
- especially when I've got a chest like that on my head.'

'Well, you see, it's not the fashion.  The king never wears shoes.'

'The queen does.'

'Yes; but that's for distinction.  The first queen, you see - I
mean the king's first wife - wore shoes, of course, because she
came from upstairs; and so, when she died, the next queen would not
be inferior to her as she called it, and would wear shoes too.  It
was all pride.  She is the hardest in forbidding them to the rest
of the women.'

'I'm sure I wouldn't wear them - no, not for - that I wouldn't!'
said the first voice, which was evidently that of the mother of the
family.  'I can't think why either of them should.'

'Didn't I tell you the first was from upstairs?' said the other.
'That was the only silly thing I ever knew His Majesty guilty of.
Why should he marry an outlandish woman like that-one of our
natural enemies too?'

'I suppose he fell in love with her.'
'Pooh! pooh!  He's just as happy now with one of his own people.'

'Did she die very soon?  They didn't tease her to death, did they?'

'Oh, dear, no!  The king worshipped her very footmarks.'

'What made her die, then?  Didn't the air agree with her?'

'She died when the young prince was born.'

'How silly of her!  We never do that.  It must have been because
she wore shoes.'

'I don't know that.'

'Why do they wear shoes up there?'

'Ah, now that's a sensible question, and I will answer it.  But in
order to do so, I must first tell you a secret.  I once saw the
queen's feet.'

'Without her shoes?'

'Yes - without her shoes.'

'No!  Did you?  How was it?'

'Never you mind how it was.  She didn't know I saw them.  And what
do you think! - they had toes!'

'Toes!  What's that?'

'You may well ask!  I should never have known if I had not seen the
queen's feet.  just imagine! the ends of her feet were split up
into five or six thin pieces!'

'Oh, horrid!  How could the king have fallen in love with her?'

'You forget that she wore shoes.  That is just why she wore them.
That is why all the men, and women too, upstairs wear shoes.  They
can't bear the sight of their own feet without them.'

'Ah! now I understand.  If ever you wish for shoes again, Helfer,
I'll hit your feet - I will.'

'No, no, mother; pray don't.'

'Then don't you.'

'But with such a big box on my head -'

A horrid scream followed, which Curdie interpreted as in reply to
a blow from his mother upon the feet of her eldest goblin.

'Well, I never knew so much before!' remarked a fourth voice.

'Your knowledge is not universal quite yet,' said the father.  'You
were only fifty last month.  Mind you see to the bed and bedding.
As soon as we've finished our supper, we'll be up and going.  Ha!
ha! ha!'

'What are you laughing at, husband?'

'I'm laughing to think what a mess the miners will find themselves
in - somewhere before this day ten years.'

'Why, what do you mean?'

'Oh, nothing.'

'Oh, yes, you do mean something.  You always do mean something.'

'It's more than you do, then, wife.'
'That may be; but it's not more than I find out, you know.'

'Ha! ha!  You're a sharp one.  What a mother you've got, Helfer!'

'Yes, father.'

'Well, I suppose I must tell you.  They're all at the palace
consulting about it tonight; and as soon as we've got away from
this thin place I'm going there to hear what night they fix upon.
I should like to see that young ruffian there on the other side,
struggling in the agonies of -'

He dropped his voice so low that Curdie could hear only a growl.
The growl went on in the low bass for a good while, as inarticulate
as if the goblin's tongue had been a sausage; and it was not until
his wife spoke again that it rose to its former pitch.

'But what shall we do when you are at the palace?' she asked.

'I will see you safe in the new house I've been digging for you for
the last two months.  Podge, you mind the table and chairs.  I
commit them to your care.  The table has seven legs - each chair
three.  I shall require them all at your hands.'

After this arose a confused conversation about the various
household goods and their transport; and Curdie heard nothing more
that was of any importance.

He now knew at least one of the reasons for the constant sound of
the goblin hammers and pickaxes at night.  They were making new
houses for themselves, to which they might retreat when the miners
should threaten to break into their dwellings.  But he had learned
two things of far greater importance.  The first was, that some
grievous calamity was preparing, and almost ready to fall upon the
heads of the miners; the second was - the one weak point of a
goblin's body; he had not known that their feet were so tender as
he had now reason to suspect.  He had heard it said that they had
no toes: he had never had opportunity of inspecting them closely
enough, in the dusk in which they always appeared, to satisfy
himself whether it was a correct report.  Indeed, he had not been
able even to satisfy himself as to whether they had no fingers,
although that also was commonly said to be the fact.  One of the
miners, indeed, who had had more schooling than the rest, was wont
to argue that such must have been the primordial condition of
humanity, and that education and handicraft had developed both toes
and fingers - with which proposition Curdie had once heard his
father sarcastically agree, alleging in support of it the
probability that babies' gloves were a traditional remnant of the
old state of things; while the stockings of all ages, no regard
being paid in them to the toes, pointed in the same direction.  But
what was of importance was the fact concerning the softness of the
goblin feet, which he foresaw might be useful to all miners.  What
he had to do in the meantime, however, was to discover, if
possible, the special evil design the goblins had now in their
heads.

Although he knew all the gangs and all the natural galleries with
which they communicated in the mined part of the mountain, he had
not the least idea where the palace of the king of the gnomes was;
otherwise he would have set out at once on the enterprise of
discovering what the said design was.  He judged, and rightly, that
it must lie in a farther part of the mountain, between which and
the mine there was as yet no communication.  There must be one
nearly completed, however; for it could be but a thin partition
which now separated them.  If only he could get through in time to
follow the goblins as they retreated!  A few blows would doubtless
be sufficient - just where his ear now lay; but if he attempted to
strike there with his pickaxe, he would only hasten the departure
of the family, put them on their guard, and perhaps lose their
involuntary guidance.  He therefore began to feel the wall With his
hands, and soon found that some of the stones were loose enough to
be drawn out with little noise.

Laying hold of a large one with both his hands, he drew it gently
out, and let it down softly.

'What was that noise?' said the goblin father.

Curdie blew out his light, lest it should shine through.

'It must be that one miner that stayed behind the rest,' said the
mother.

'No; he's been gone a good while.  I haven't heard a blow for an
hour.  Besides, it wasn't like that.'

'Then I suppose it must have been a stone carried down the brook
inside.'
'Perhaps.  It will have more room by and by.'

Curdie kept quite still.  After a little while, hearing nothing but
the sounds of their preparations for departure, mingled with an
occasional word of direction, and anxious to know whether the
removal of the stone had made an opening into the goblins' house,
he put in his hand to feel.  It went in a good way, and then came
in contact with something soft.  He had but a moment to feel it
over, it was so quickly withdrawn: it was one of the toeless goblin
feet.  The owner of it gave a cry of fright.

'What's the matter, Helfer?' asked his mother.

'A beast came out of the wall and licked my foot.'

'Nonsense!  There are no wild beasts in our country,' said his
father.

'But it was, father.  I felt it.'

'Nonsense, I say.  Will you malign your native realms and reduce
them to a level with the country upstairs?  That is swarming with
wild beasts of every description.'

'But I did feel it, father.'

'I tell you to hold your tongue.  You are no patriot.'

Curdie suppressed his laughter, and lay still as a mouse - but no
stiller, for every moment he kept nibbling away with his fingers at
the edges of the hole.  He was slowly making it bigger, for here
the rock had been very much shattered with the blasting.

There seemed to be a good many in the family, to judge from the
mass of confused talk which now and then came through the hole; but
when all were speaking together, and just as if they had
bottle-brushes - each at least one - in their throats, it was not
easy to make out much that was said.  At length he heard once more
what the father goblin was saying.

'Now, then,' he said, 'get your bundles on your backs.  Here,
Helfer, I'll help you up with your chest.'

'I wish it was my chest, father.'

'Your turn will come in good time enough!  Make haste.  I must go
to the meeting at the palace tonight.  When that's over, we can
come back and clear out the last of the things before our enemies
return in the morning.  Now light your torches, and come along.
What a distinction it is, to provide our own light, instead of
being dependent on a thing hung up in the air - a most disagreeable
contrivance - intended no doubt to blind us when we venture out
under its baleful influence!  Quite glaring and vulgar, I call it,
though no doubt useful to poor creatures who haven't the wit to
make light for themselves.'

Curdie could hardly keep himself from calling through to know
whether they made the fire to light their torches by.  But a
moment's reflection showed him that they would have said they did,
inasmuch as they struck two stones together, and the fire came.



CHAPTER 9
The Hall of the Goblin Palace


A sound of many soft feet followed, but soon ceased.  Then Curdie
flew at the hole like a tiger, and tore and pulled.  The sides gave
way, and it was soon large enough for him to crawl through.  He
would not betray himself by rekindling his lamp, but the torches of
the retreating company, which he found departing in a straight line
up a long avenue from the door of their cave, threw back light
enough to afford him a glance round the deserted home of the
goblins.  To his surprise, he could discover nothing to distinguish
it from an ordinary natural cave in the rock, upon many of which he
had come with the rest of the miners in the progress of their
excavations.  The goblins had talked of coming back for the rest of
their household gear: he saw nothing that would have made him
suspect a family had taken shelter there for a single night.  The
floor was rough and stony; the walls full of projecting corners;
the roof in one place twenty feet high, in another endangering his
forehead; while on one side a stream, no thicker than a needle, it
is true, but still sufficient to spread a wide dampness over the
wall, flowed down the face of the rock.  But the troop in front of
him was toiling under heavy burdens.  He could distinguish Helfer
now and then, in the flickering light and shade, with his heavy
chest on his bending shoulders; while the second brother was almost
buried in what looked like a great feather bed.  'Where do they get
the feathers?' thought Curdie; but in a moment the troop
disappeared at a turn of the way, and it was now both safe and
necessary for Curdie to follow them, lest they should be round the
next turning before he saw them again, for so he might lose them
altogether.  He darted after them like a greyhound.  When he
reached the corner and looked cautiously round, he saw them again
at some distance down another long passage.  None of the galleries
he saw that night bore signs of the work of man - or of goblin
either.  Stalactites, far older than the mines, hung from their
roofs; and their floors were rough with boulders and large round
stones, showing that there water must have once run.  He waited
again at this corner till they had disappeared round the next, and
so followed them a long way through one passage after another.  The
passages grew more and more lofty, and were more and more covered
in the roof with shining stalactites.

It was a strange enough procession which he followed.  But the
strangest part of it was the household animals which crowded
amongst the feet of the goblins.  It was true they had no wild
animals down there - at least they did not know of any; but they
had a wonderful number of tame ones.  I must, however, reserve any
contributions towards the natural history of these for a later
position in my story.

At length, turning a corner too abruptly, he had almost rushed into
the middle of the goblin family; for there they had already set
down all their burdens on the floor of a cave considerably larger
than that which they had left.  They were as yet too breathless to
speak, else he would have had warning of their arrest.  He started
back, however, before anyone saw him, and retreating a good way,
stood watching till the father should come out to go to the palace.

Before very long, both he and his son Helfer appeared and kept on
in the same direction as before, while Curdie followed them again
with renewed precaution.  For a long time he heard no sound except
something like the rush of a river inside the rock; but at length
what seemed the far-off noise of a great shouting reached his ears,
which, however, presently ceased.  After advancing a good way
farther, he thought he heard a single voice.  It sounded clearer
and clearer as he went on, until at last he could almost
distinguish the words.  In a moment or two, keeping after the
goblins round another corner, he once more started back - this time
in amazement.

He was at the entrance of a magnificent cavern, of an oval shape,
once probably a huge natural reservoir of water, now the great
palace hall of the goblins.  It rose to a tremendous height, but
the roof was composed of such shining materials, and the multitude
of torches carried by the goblins who crowded the floor lighted up
the place so brilliantly, that Curdie could see to the top quite
well.  But he had no idea how immense the place was until his eyes
had got accustomed to it, which was not for a good many minutes.
The rough projections on the walls, and the shadows thrown upwards
from them by the torches, made the sides of the chamber look as if
they were crowded with statues upon brackets and pedestals,
reaching in irregular tiers from floor to roof.  The walls
themselves were, in many parts, of gloriously shining substances,
some of them gorgeously coloured besides, which powerfully
contrasted with the shadows.  Curdie could not help wondering
whether his rhymes would be of any use against such a multitude of
goblins as filled the floor of the hall, and indeed felt
considerably tempted to begin his shout of 'One, two, three!', but
as there was no reason for routing them and much for endeavouring
to discover their designs, he kept himself perfectly quiet, and
peering round the edge of the doorway, listened with both his sharp
ears.

At the other end of the hall, high above the heads of the
multitude, was a terrace-like ledge of considerable height, caused
by the receding of the upper part of the cavern- wall.  Upon this
sat the king and his court: the king on a throne hollowed out of a
huge block of green copper ore, and his court upon lower seats
around it.  The king had been making them a speech, and the
applause which followed it was what Curdie had heard.  One of the
court was now addressing the multitude.  What he heard him say was
to the following effect: 'Hence it appears that two plans have been
for some time together working in the strong head of His Majesty
for the deliverance of his people.  Regardless of the fact that we
were the first possessors of the regions they now inhabit;
regardless equally of the fact that we abandoned that region from
the loftiest motives; regardless also of the self-evident fact that
we excel them so far in mental ability as they excel us in stature,
they look upon us as a degraded race and make a mockery of all our
finer feelings.  But, the time has almost arrived when - thanks to
His Majesty's inventive genius - it will be in our power to take a
thorough revenge upon them once for all, in respect of their
unfriendly behaviour.'

'May it please Your Majesty -' cried a voice close by the door,
which Curdie recognized as that of the goblin he had followed.

'Who is he that interrupts the Chancellor?' cried another from near
the throne.
'Glump,' answered several voices.

'He is our trusty subject,' said the king himself, in a slow and
stately voice: 'let him come forward and speak.'

A lane was parted through the crowd, and Glump, having ascended the
platform and bowed to the king, spoke as follows:

'Sire, I would have held my peace, had I not known that I only knew
how near was the moment, to which the Chancellor had just referred.

In all probability, before another day is past, the enemy will have
broken through into my house - the partition between being even now
not more than a foot in thickness.'

'Not quite so much,' thought Curdie to himself.

'This very evening I have had to remove my household effects;
therefore the sooner we are ready to carry out the plan, for the
execution of which His Majesty has been making such magnificent
preparations, the better.  I may just add, that within the last few
days I have perceived a small outbreak in my dining-room, which,
combined with observations upon the course of the river escaping
where the evil men enter, has convinced me that close to the spot
must be a deep gulf in its channel.  This discovery will, I trust,
add considerably to the otherwise immense forces at His Majesty's
disposal.'

He ceased, and the king graciously acknowledged his speech with a
bend of his head; whereupon Glump, after a bow to His Majesty, slid
down amongst the rest of the undistinguished multitude.  Then the
Chancellor rose and resumed.

'The information which the worthy Glump has given us,' he said,
'might have been of considerable import at the present moment, but
for that other design already referred to, which naturally takes
precedence.  His Majesty, unwilling to proceed to extremities, and
well aware that such measures sooner or later result in violent
reactions, has excogitated a more fundamental and comprehensive
measure, of which I need say no more.  Should His Majesty be
successful - as who dares to doubt? - then a peace, all to the
advantage of the goblin kingdom, will be established for a
generation at least, rendered absolutely secure by the pledge which
His Royal Highness the prince will have and hold for the good
behaviour of her relatives.  Should His Majesty fail - which who
shall dare even to imagine in his most secret thoughts? - then will
be the time for carrying out with rigour the design to which Glump
referred, and for which our preparations are even now all but
completed.  The failure of the former will render the latter
imperative.'

Curdie, perceiving that the assembly was drawing to a close and
that there was little chance of either plan being more fully
discovered, now thought it prudent to make his escape before the
goblins began to disperse, and slipped quietly away.

There was not much danger of meeting any goblins, for all the men
at least were left behind him in the palace; but there was
considerable danger of his taking a wrong turning, for he had now
no light, and had therefore to depend upon his memory and his
hands.  After he had left behind him the glow that issued from the
door of Glump's new abode, he was utterly without guide, so far as
his eyes were concerned.

He was most anxious to get back through the hole before the goblins
should return to fetch the remains of their furniture.  It was not
that he was in the least afraid of them, but, as it was of the
utmost importance that he should thoroughly discover what the plans
they were cherishing were, he must not occasion the slightest
suspicion that they were watched by a miner.

He hurried on, feeling his way along the walls of rock.  Had he not
been very courageous, he must have been very anxious, for he could
not but know that if he lost his way it would be the most difficult
thing in the world to find it again.  Morning would bring no light
into these regions; and towards him least of all, who was known as
a special rhymester and persecutor, could goblins be expected to
exercise courtesy.  Well might he wish that he had brought his lamp
and tinder-box with him, of which he had not thought when he crept
so eagerly after the goblins!  He wished it all the more when,
after a while, he found his way blocked up, and could get no
farther.  It was of no use to turn back, for he had not the least
idea where he had begun to go wrong.  Mechanically, however, he
kept feeling about the walls that hemmed him in.  His hand came
upon a place where a tiny stream of water was running down the face
of the rock.  'What a stupid I am!' he said to himself.  'I am
actually at the end of my journey!  And there are the goblins
coming back to fetch their things!' he added, as the red glimmer of
their torches appeared at the end of the long avenue that led up to
the cave.  In a moment he had thrown himself on the floor, and
wriggled backwards through the hole.  The floor on the other side
was several feet lower, which made it easier to get back.  It was
all he could do to lift the largest stone he had taken out of the
hole, but he did manage to shove it in again.  He sat down on the
ore-heap and thought.

He was pretty sure that the latter plan of the goblins was to
inundate the mine by breaking outlets for the water accumulated in
the natural reservoirs of the mountain, as well as running through
portions of it.  While the part hollowed by the miners remained
shut off from that inhabited by the goblins, they had had no
opportunity of injuring them thus; but now that a passage was
broken through, and the goblins' part proved the higher in the
mountain, it was clear to Curdie that the mine could be destroyed
in an hour.  Water was always the chief danger to which the miners
were exposed.  They met with a little choke-damp sometimes, but
never with the explosive firedamp so common in coal-mines.  Hence
they were careful as soon as they saw any appearance of water.
As the result of his reflections while the goblins were busy in
their old home, it seemed to Curdie that it would be best to build
up the whole of this gang, filling it with stone, and clay or lie,
so that there should be no smallest channel for the water to get
into.  There was not, however, any immediate danger, for the
execution of the goblins' plan was contingent upon the failure of
that unknown design which was to take precedence of it; and he was
most anxious to keep the door of communication open, that he might
if possible discover what the former plan was.  At the same time
they could not resume their intermitted labours for the inundation
without his finding it out; when by putting all hands to the work,
the one existing outlet might in a single night be rendered
impenetrable to any weight of water; for by filling the gang
entirely up, their embankment would be buttressed by the sides of
the mountain itself.

As soon as he found that the goblins had again retired, he lighted
his lamp, and proceeded to fill the hole he had made with such
stones as he could withdraw when he pleased.  He then thought it
better, as he might have occasion to be up a good many nights after
this, to go home and have some sleep.

How pleasant the night air felt upon the outside of the mountain
after what he had gone through in the inside of it!  He hurried up
the hill without meeting a single goblin on the way, and called and
tapped at the window until he woke his father, who soon rose and
let him in.  He told him the whole story; and, just as he had
expected, his father thought it best to work that lode no farther,
but at the same time to pretend occasionally to be at work there
still in order that the goblins might have no suspicions.  Both
father and son then went to bed and slept soundly until the
morning.

CHAPTER 10
The Princess's King-Papa


The weather continued fine for weeks, and the little princess went
out every day.  So long a period of fine weather had indeed never
been known upon that mountain.  The only uncomfortable thing was
that her nurse was so nervous and particular about being in before
the sun was down that often she would take to her heels when
nothing worse than a fleecy cloud crossing the sun threw a shadow
on the hillside; and many an evening they were home a full hour
before the sunlight had left the weather-cock on the stables.  If
it had not been for such odd behaviour Irene would by this time
have almost forgotten the goblins.  She never forgot Curdie, but
him she remembered for his own sake, and indeed would have
remembered him if only because a princess never forgets her debts
until they are paid.

One splendid sunshiny day, about an hour after noon, Irene, who was
playing on a lawn in the garden, heard the distant blast of a
bugle.  She jumped up with a cry of joy, for she knew by that
particular blast that her father was on his way to see her.  This
part of the garden lay on the slope of the hill and allowed a full
view of the country below.  So she shaded her eyes with her hand
and looked far away to catch the first glimpse of shining armour.
In a few moments a little troop came glittering round the shoulder
of a hill.  Spears and helmets were sparkling and gleaming, banners
were flying, horses prancing, and again came the bugle-blast which
was to her like the voice of her father calling across the
distance: 'Irene, I'm coming.'

On and on they came until she could clearly distinguish the king.
He rode a white horse and was taller than any of the men with him.
He wore a narrow circle of gold set with jewels around his helmet,
and as he came still nearer Irene could discern the flashing of the
stones in the sun.  It was a long time since he had been to see
her, and her little heart beat faster and faster as the shining
troop approached, for she loved her king-papa very dearly and was
nowhere so happy as in his arms.  When they reached a certain
point, after which she could see them no more from the garden, she
ran to the gate, and there stood till up they came, clanging and
stamping, with one more bright bugle-blast which said: 'Irene, I am
come.'

By this time the people of the house were all gathered at the gate,
but Irene stood alone in front of them.  When the horsemen pulled
up she ran to the side of the white horse and held up her arms.
The king stopped and took her hands.  In an instant she was on the
saddle and clasped in his great strong arms.

I wish I could describe the king so that you could see him in your
mind.  He had gentle, blue eyes, but a nose that made him look like
an eagle.  A long dark beard, streaked with silvery lines, flowed
from his mouth almost to his waist, and as Irene sat on the saddle
and hid her glad face upon his bosom it mingled with the golden
hair which her mother had given her, and the two together were like
a cloud with streaks of the sun woven through it.  After he had
held her to his heart for a minute he spoke to his white horse, and
the great beautiful creature, which had been prancing so proudly a
little while before, walked as gently as a lady - for he knew he
had a little lady on his back - through the gate and up to the door
of the house.  Then the king set her on the ground and,
dismounting, took her hand and walked with her into the great hall,
which was hardly ever entered except when he came to see his little
princess.  There he sat down, with two of his counsellors who had
accompanied him, to have some refreshment, and Irene sat on his
right hand and drank her milk out of a wooden bowl curiously
carved.

After the king had eaten and drunk he turned to the princess and
said, stroking her hair:

'Now, my child, what shall we do next?'

This was the question he almost always put to her first after their
meal together; and Irene had been waiting for it with some
impatience, for now, she thought, she should be able to settle a
question which constantly perplexed her.

'I should like you to take me to see my great old grandmother.'

The king looked grave And said:

'What does my little daughter mean?'

'I mean the Queen Irene that lives up in the tower - the very old
lady, you know, with the long hair of silver.'

The king only gazed at his little princess with a look which she
could not understand.

'She's got her crown in her bedroom,' she went on; 'but I've not
been in there yet.  You know she's there, don't you?'

'No,' said the king, very quietly.

'Then it must all be a dream,' said Irene.  'I half thought it was;
but I couldn't be sure.  Now I am sure of it.  Besides, I couldn't
find her the next time I went up.'

At that moment a snow-white pigeon flew in at an open window and
settled upon Irene's head.  She broke into a merry laugh, cowered
a little, and put up her hands to her head, saying:

'Dear dovey, don't peck me.  You'll pull out my hair with your long
claws if you don't mind.'

The king stretched out his hand to take the pigeon, but it spread
its wings and flew again through the open window, when its
Whiteness made one flash in the sun and vanished.  The king laid
his hand on his princess's head, held it back a little, gazed in
her face, smiled half a smile, and sighed half a sigh.

'Come, my child; we'll have a walk in the garden together,' he
said.

'You won't come up and see my huge, great, beautiful grandmother,
then, king-papa?' said the princess.

'Not this time,' said the king very gently.  'She has not invited
me, you know, and great old ladies like her do not choose to be
visited without leave asked and given.'

The garden was a very lovely place.  Being upon a Mountainside
there were parts in it where the rocks came through in great
masses, and all immediately about them remained quite wild.  Tufts
of heather grew upon them, and other hardy mountain plants and
flowers, while near them would be lovely roses and lilies and all
pleasant garden flowers.  This mingling of the wild mountain with
the civilized garden was very quaint, and it was impossible for any
number of gardeners to make such a garden look formal and stiff.

Against one of these rocks was a garden seat, shadowed from the
afternoon sun by the overhanging of the rock itself.  There was a
little winding path up to the top of the rock, and on top another
seat; but they sat on the seat at its foot because the sun was hot;
and there they talked together of many things.  At length the king
said:

'You were out late one evening, Irene.'

'Yes, papa.  It was my fault; and Lootie was very sorry.'

'I must talk to Lootie about it,' said the king.

'Don't speak loud to her, please, papa,' said Irene.  'She's been
so afraid of being late ever since!  Indeed she has not been
naughty.  It was only a mistake for once.'

'Once might be too often,' murmured the king to himself, as he
stroked his child's head.

I can't tell you how he had come to know.  I am sure Curdie had not
told him.  Someone about the palace must have seen them, after all.

He sat for a good while thinking.  There was no sound to be heard
except that of a little stream which ran merrily out of an opening
in the rock by where they sat, and sped away down the hill through
the garden.  Then he rose and, leaving Irene where she was, went
into the house and sent for Lootie, with whom he had a talk that
made her cry.
When in the evening he rode away upon his great white horse, he
left six of his attendants behind him, with orders that three of
them should watch outside the house every night, walking round and
round it from sunset to sunrise.  It was clear he was not quite
comfortable about the princess.



CHAPTER 11
The Old Lady's Bedroom


Nothing more happened worth telling for some time.  The autumn came
and went by.  There were no more flowers in the garden.  The wind
blew strong, and howled among the rocks.  The rain fell, and
drenched the few yellow and red leaves that could not get off the
bare branches.  Again and again there would be a glorious morning
followed by a pouring afternoon, and sometimes, for a week
together, there would be rain, nothing but rain, all day, and then
the most lovely cloudless night, with the sky all out in full-blown
stars - not one missing.  But the princess could not see much of
them, for she went to bed early.  The winter drew on, and she found
things growing dreary.  When it was too stormy to go out, and she
had got tired of her toys, Lootie would take her about the house,
sometimes to the housekeeper's room, where the housekeeper, who was
a good, kind old woman, made much of her - sometimes to the
servants' hall or the kitchen, where she was not princess merely,
but absolute queen, and ran a great risk of being spoiled.
Sometimes she would run off herself to the room where the
men-at-arms whom the king had left sat, and they showed her their
arms and accoutrements and did what they could to amuse her.  Still
at times she found it very dreary, and often and often wished that
her huge great grandmother had not been a dream.

One morning the nurse left her with the housekeeper for a while.
To amuse her she turned out the contents of an old cabinet upon the
table.  The little princess found her treasures, queer ancient
ornaments, and many things the use of which she could not imagine,
far more interesting than her own toys, and sat playing with them
for two hours or more.  But, at length, in handling a curious
old-fashioned brooch, she ran the pin of it into her thumb, and
gave a little scream with the sharpness of the pain, but would have
thought little more of it had not the pain increased and her thumb
begun to swell.  This alarmed the housekeeper greatly.  The nurse
was fetched; the doctor was sent for; her hand was poulticed, and
long before her usual time she was put to bed.  The pain still
continued, and although she fell asleep and dreamed a good many
dreams, there was the pain always in every dream.  At last it woke
her UP.

The moon was shining brightly into the room.  The poultice had
fallen off her hand and it was burning hot.  She fancied if she
could hold it into the moonlight that would cool it.  So she got
out of bed, without waking the nurse who lay at the other end of
the room, and went to the window.  When she looked out she saw one
of the men-at-arms walking in the garden with the moonlight
glancing on his armour.  She was just going to tap on the window
and call him, for she wanted to tell him all about it, when she
bethought herself that that might wake Lootie, and she would put
her into her bed again.  So she resolved to go to the window of
another room, and call him from there.  It was so much nicer to
have somebody to talk to than to lie awake in bed with the burning
pain in her hand.  She opened the door very gently and went through
the nursery, which did not look into the garden, to go to the other
window.  But when she came to the foot of the old staircase there
was the moon shining down from some window high up, and making the
worm-eaten oak look very strange and delicate and lovely.  In a
moment she was putting her little feet one after the other in the
silvery path up the stair, looking behind as she went, to see the
shadow they made in the middle of the silver.  Some little girls
would have been afraid to find themselves thus alone in the middle
of the night, but Irene was a princess.

As she went slowly up the stair, not quite sure that she was not
dreaming, suddenly a great longing woke up in her heart to try once
more whether she could not find the old lady with the silvery hair.
'If she is a dream,' she said to herself, 'then I am the likelier
to find her, if I am dreaming.'

So up and up she went, stair after stair, until she Came to the
many rooms - all just as she had seen them before.  Through passage
after passage she softly sped, comforting herself that if she
should lose her way it would not matter much, because when she woke
she would find herself in her own bed with Lootie not far off.
But, as if she had known every step of the way, she walked straight
to the door at the foot of the narrow stair that led to the tower.

'What if I should realreality-really find my beautiful old
grandmother up there!' she said to herself as she crept up the
steep steps.

When she reached the top she stood a moment listening in the dark,
for there was no moon there.  Yes! it was! it was the hum of the
spinning-wheel!  What a diligent grandmother to work both day and
night!  She tapped gently at the door.

'Come in, Irene,'said the sweet voice.

The princess opened the door and entered.  There was the moonlight
streaming in at the window, and in the middle of the moonlight sat
the old lady in her black dress with the white lace, and her
silvery hair mingling with the moonlight, so that you could not
have told which was which.  'Come in, Irene,' she said again.  'Can
you tell me what I am spinning?'

'She speaks,' thought Irene, 'just as if she had seen me five
minutes ago, or yesterday at the farthest.  - No,' she answered; 'I
don't know what you are spinning.  Please, I thought you were a
dream.  Why couldn't I find you before, great-great-grandmother?'

'That you are hardly old enough to understand.  But you would have
found me sooner if you hadn't come to think I was a dream.  I will
give you one reason though why you couldn't find me.  I didn't want
you to find me.'

'Why, please?'

'Because I did not want Lootie to know I was here.'

'But you told me to tell Lootie.'

'Yes.  But I knew Lootie would not believe you.  If she were to see
me sitting spinning here, she wouldn't believe me, either.'

'Why?'

'Because she couldn't.  She would rub her eyes, and go away and say
she felt queer, and forget half of it and more, and then say it had
been all a dream.'

'Just like me,' said Irene, feeling very much ashamed of herself.

'Yes, a good deal like you, but not just like you; for you've come
again; and Lootie wouldn't have come again.  She would have said,
No, no - she had had enough of such nonsense.'

'Is it naughty of Lootie, then?'

'It would be naughty of you.  I've never done anything for Lootie.'

'And you did wash my face and hands for me,' said Irene, beginning
to cry.

The old lady smiled a sweet smile and said:

'I'm not vexed with you, my child - nor with Lootie either.  But I
don't want you to say anything more to Lootie about me.  If she
should ask you, you must just be silent.  But I do not think she
will ask you.'

All the time they talked the old lady kept on spinning.

'You haven't told me yet what I am spinning,' she said.

'Because I don't know.  It's very pretty stuff.'

It was indeed very pretty stuff.  There was a good bunch of it on
the distaff attached to the spinning-wheel, and in the moonlight it
shone like - what shall i say it was like?  It was not white enough
for silver - yes, it was like silver, but shone grey rather than
white, and glittered only a little.  And the thread the old lady
drew out from it was so fine that Irene could hardly see it.
'I am spinning this for you, my child.'

'For me!  What am I to do with it, please?'

'I will tell you by and by.  But first I will tell you what it is.
It is spider-web - of a particular kind.  My pigeons bring it me
from over the great sea.  There is only one forest where the
spiders live who make this particular kind - the finest and
strongest of any.  I have nearly finished my present job.  What is
on the rock now will be enough.  I have a week's work there yet,
though,' she added, looking at the bunch.

'Do you work all day and all night, too, great-great-
great-great-grandmother?' said the princess, thinking to be very
polite with so many greats.

'I am not quite so great as all that,' she answered, smiling almost
merrily.  'If you call me grandmother, that will do.  No, I don't
work every night - only moonlit nights, and then no longer than the
moon shines upon my wheel.  I shan't work much longer tonight.'

'And what will you do next, grandmother?'
'Go to bed.  Would you like to see my bedroom?'

'Yes, that I should.'

'Then I think I won't work any longer tonight.  I shall be in good
time.'

The old lady rose, and left her wheel standing just as it was.  You
see there was no good in putting it away, for where there was not
any furniture there was no danger of being untidy.

Then she took Irene by the hand, but it was her bad hand and Irene
gave a little cry of pain.  'My child!' said her grandmother, 'what
is the matter?'

Irene held her hand into the moonlight, that the old lady might see
it, and told her all about it, at which she looked grave.  But she
only said: 'Give me your other hand'; and, having led her out upon
the little dark landing, opened the door on the opposite side of
it.  What was Irene's surprise to see the loveliest room she had
ever seen in her life!  It was large and lofty, and dome-shaped.
From the centre hung a lamp as round as a ball, shining as if with
the brightest moonlight, which made everything visible in the room,
though not so clearly that the princess could tell what many of the
things were.  A large oval bed stood in the middle, with a coverlid
of rose colour, and velvet curtains all round it of a lovely pale
blue.  The walls were also blue - spangled all over with what
looked like stars of silver.

The old lady left her and, going to a strange-looking cabinet,
opened it and took out a curious silver casket.  Then she sat down
on a low chair and, calling Irene, made her kneel before her while
she looked at her hand.  Having examined it, she opened the casket,
and took from it a little ointment.  The sweetest odour filled the
room - like that of roses and lilies - as she rubbed the ointment
gently all over the hot swollen hand.  Her touch was so pleasant
and cool that it seemed to drive away the pain and heat wherever it
came.

'Oh, grandmother! it is so nice!' said Irene.  'Thank you; thank
you.'

Then the old lady went to a chest of drawers, and took out a large
handkerchief of gossamer-like cambric, which she tied round her
hand.

'I don't think I can let you go away tonight,' she said.  'Would
you like to sleep with me?'

'Oh, yes, yes, dear grandmother,' said Irene, and would have
clapped her hands, forgetting that she could not.

'You won't be afraid, then, to go to bed with such an old woman?'

'No.  You are so beautiful, grandmother.'

'But I am very old.'

'And I suppose I am very young.  You won't mind sleeping with such
a very young woman, grandmother?'

'You sweet little pertness!' said the old lady, and drew her
towards her, and kissed her on the forehead and the cheek and the
mouth.  Then she got a large silver basin, and having poured some
water into it made Irene sit on the chair, and washed her feet.
This done, she was ready for bed.  And oh, what a delicious bed it
was into which her grandmother laid her!  She hardly could have
told she was lying upon anything: she felt nothing but the
softness.

The old lady having undressed herself lay down beside her.

'Why don't you put out your moon?' asked the princess.

'That never goes out, night or day,' she answered.  'In the darkest
night, if any of my pigeons are out on a message, they always see
my moon and know where to fly to.'

'But if somebody besides the pigeons were to see it - somebody
about the house, I mean - they would come to look what it was and
find you.'

'The better for them, then,' said the old lady.  'But it does not
happen above five times in a hundred years that anyone does see it.

The greater part of those who do take it for a meteor, wink their
eyes, and forget it again.  Besides, nobody could find the room
except I pleased.  Besides, again - I will tell you a secret - if
that light were to go out you would fancy yourself lying in a bare
garret, on a heap of old straw, and would not see one of the
pleasant things round about you all the time.'

'I hope it will never go out,' said the princess.

'I hope not.  But it is time we both went to sleep.  Shall I take
you in my arms?'

The little princess nestled close up to the old lady, who took her
in both her arms and held her close to her bosom.

'Oh, dear! this is so nice!' said the princess.  'I didn't know
anything in the world could be so comfortable.  I should like to
lie here for ever.'

'You may if you will,' said the old lady.  'But I must put you to
one trial-not a very hard one, I hope.  This night week you must
come back to me.  If you don't, I do not know when you may find me
again, and you Will soon want me very much.'
'Oh! please, don't let me forget.'

'You shall not forget.  The only question is whether you will
believe I am anywhere - whether you will believe I am anything but
a dream.  You may be sure I will do all I can to help you to come.
But it will rest with yourself, after all.  On the night of next
Friday, you must come to me.  Mind now.'

'I will try,' said the princess.

'Then good night,' said the old lady, and kissed the forehead which
lay in her bosom.

In a moment more the little princess was dreaming in the midst of
the loveliest dreams - of summer seas and moonlight and mossy
springs and great murmuring trees, and beds of wild flowers with
such odours as she had never smelled before.  But, after all, no
dream could be more lovely than what she had left behind when she
fell asleep.

In the morning she found herself in her own bed.  There was no
handkerchief or anything else on her hand, only a sweet odour
lingered about it.  The swelling had all gone down; the prick of
the brooch had vanished - in fact, her hand was perfectly well.



CHAPTER 12
A Short Chapter About Curdie

Curdie spent many nights in the mine.  His father and he had taken
Mrs. Peterson into the secret, for they knew mother could hold her
tongue, which was more than could be said of all the miners' wives.

But Curdie did not tell her that every night he spent in the mine,
part of it went in earning a new red petticoat for her.

Mrs. Peterson was such a nice good mother!  All mothers are nice
and good more or less, but Mrs. Peterson was nice and good all more
and no less.  She made and kept a little heaven in that poor
cottage on the high hillside for her husband and son to go home to
out of the low and rather dreary earth in which they worked.  I
doubt if the princess was very much happier even in the arms of her
huge great-grandmother than Peter and Curdie were in the arms of
Mrs. Peterson.  True, her hands were hard and chapped and large,
but it was with work for them; and therefore, in the sight of the
angels, her hands were so much the more beautiful.  And if Curdie
worked hard to get her a petticoat, she worked hard every day to
get him comforts which he would have missed much more than she
would a new petticoat even in winter.  Not that she and Curdie ever
thought of how much they worked for each other: that would have
spoiled everything.

When left alone in the mine Curdie always worked on for an hour or
two at first, following the lode which, according to Glump, would
lead at last into the deserted habitation.  After that, he would
set out on a reconnoitring expedition.  In order to manage this, or
rather the return from it, better than the first time, he had
bought a huge ball of fine string, having learned the trick from
Hop-o'-my-Thumb, whose history his mother had often told him.  Not
that Hop-o'-my-Thumb had ever used a ball of string - I should be
sorry to be supposed so far out in my classics - but the principle
was the same as that of the pebbles.  The end of this string he
fastened to his pickaxe, which figured no bad anchor, and then,
with the ball in his hand, unrolling it as he went, set out in the
dark through the natural gangs of the goblins' territory.  The
first night or two he came upon nothing worth remembering; saw only
a little of the home-life of the cobs in the various caves they
called houses; failed in coming upon anything to cast light upon
the foregoing design which kept the inundation for the present in
the background.  But at length, I think on the third or fourth
night, he found, partly guided by the noise of their implements, a
company of evidently the best sappers and miners amongst them, hard
at work.  What were they about?  It could not well be the
inundation, seeing that had in the meantime been postponed to
something else.  Then what was it?  He lurked and watched, every
now and then in the greatest risk of being detected, but without
success.  He had again and again to retreat in haste, a proceeding
rendered the more difficult that he had to gather up his string as
he returned upon its course.  It was not that he was afraid of the
goblins, but that he was afraid of their finding out that they were
watched, which might have prevented the discovery at which he
aimed.  Sometimes his haste had to be such that, when he reached
home towards morning, his string, for lack of time to wind it up as
he 'dodged the cobs', would be in what seemed most hopeless
entanglement; but after a good sleep, though a short one, he always
found his mother had got it right again.  There it was, wound in a
most respectable ball, ready for use the moment he should want it!

'I can't think how you do it, mother,' he would say.

'I follow the thread,' she would answer - 'just as you do in the
mine.'  She never had more to say about it; but the less clever she
was with her words, the more clever she was with her hands; and the
less his mother said, the more Curdie believed she had to say.  But
still he had made no discovery as to what the goblin miners were
about.



CHAPTER 13
The Cobs' Creatures


About this time the gentlemen whom the king had left behind him to
watch over the princess had each occasion to doubt the testimony of
his own eyes, for more than strange were the objects to which they
would bear witness.  They were of one sort - creatures - but so
grotesque and misshapen as to be more like a child's drawings upon
his slate than anything natural.  They saw them only at night,
while on guard about the house.  The testimony of the man who first
reported having seen one of them was that, as he was walking slowly
round the house, while yet in the shadow, he caught sight of a
creature standing on its hind legs in the moonlight, with its
forefeet upon a window-ledge, staring in at the window.  Its body
might have been that of a dog or wolf, he thought, but he declared
on his honour that its head was twice the size it ought to have
been for the size of its body, and as round as a ball, while the
face, which it turned upon him as it fled, was more like one carved
by a boy upon the turnip inside which he is going to put a candle
than anything else he could think of.  It rushed into the garden.
He sent an arrow after it, and thought he must have struck it; for
it gave an unearthly howl, and he could not find his arrow any more
than the beast, although he searched all about the place where it
vanished.  They laughed at him until he was driven to hold his
tongue, and said he must have taken too long a pull at the ale-jug.

But before two nights were over he had one to side with him, for
he, too, had seen something strange, only quite different from that
reported by the other.  The description the second man gave of the
creature he had seen was yet more grotesque and unlikely.  They
were both laughed at by the rest; but night after night another
came over to their side, until at last there was only one left to
laugh at all his companions.  Two nights more passed, and he saw
nothing; but on the third he came rushing from the garden to the
other two before the house, in such an agitation that they declared
- for it was their turn now - that the band of his helmet was
cracking under his chin with the rising of his hair inside it.
Running with him into that part of the garden which I have already
described, they saw a score of creatures, to not one of which they
could give a name, and not one of which was like another, hideous
and ludicrous at once, gambolling on the lawn in the moonlight.
The supernatural or rather subnatural ugliness of their faces, the
length of legs and necks in some, the apparent absence of both or
either in others, made the spectators, although in one consent as
to what they saw, yet doubtful, as I have said, of the evidence of
their own eyes - and ears as well; for the noises they made,
although not loud, were as uncouth and varied as their forms, and
could be described neither as grunts nor squeaks nor roars nor
howls nor barks nor yells nor screams nor croaks nor hisses nor
mews nor shrieks, but only as something like all of them mingled in
one horrible dissonance.  Keeping in the shade, the watchers had a
few moments to recover themselves before the hideous assembly
suspected their presence; but all at once, as if by common consent,
they scampered off in the direction of a great rock, and vanished
before the men had come to themselves sufficiently to think of
following them.

My readers will suspect what these were; but I will now give them
full information concerning them.  They were, of course, household
animals belonging to the goblins, whose ancestors had taken their
ancestors many centuries before from the upper regions of light
into the lower regions of darkness.  The original stocks of these
horrible creatures were very much the same as the animals now seen
about farms and homes in the country, with the exception of a few
of them, which had been wild creatures, such as foxes, and indeed
wolves and small bears, which the goblins, from their proclivity
towards the animal creation, had caught when cubs and tamed.  But
in the course of time all had undergone even greater changes than
had passed upon their owners.  They had altered - that is, their
descendants had altered - into such creatures as I have not
attempted to describe except in the vaguest manner - the various
parts of their bodies assuming, in an apparently arbitrary and
self-willed manner, the most abnormal developments.  Indeed, so
little did any distinct type predominate in some of the bewildering
results, that you could only have guessed at any known animal as
the original, and even then, what likeness remained would be more
one of general expression than of definable conformation.  But what
increased the gruesomeness tenfold was that, from constant
domestic, or indeed rather family association with the goblins,
their countenances had grown in grotesque resemblance to the human.

No one understands animals who does not see that every one of them,
even amongst the fishes, it may be with a dimness and vagueness
infinitely remote, yet shadows the human: in the case of these the
human resemblance had greatly increased: while their owners had
sunk towards them, they had risen towards their owners.  But the
conditions of subterranean life being equally unnatural for both,
while the goblins were worse, the creatures had not improved by the
approximation, and its result would have appeared far more
ludicrous than consoling to the warmest lover of animal nature.  I
shall now explain how it was that just then these animals began to
show themselves about the king's country house.

The goblins, as Curdie had discovered, were mining on - at work
both day and night, in divisions, urging the scheme after which he
lay in wait.  In the course of their tunnelling they had broken
into the channel of a small stream, but the break being in the top
of it, no water had escaped to interfere with their work.  Some of
the creatures, hovering as they often did about their masters, had
found the hole, and had, with the curiosity which had grown to a
passion from the restraints of their unnatural circumstances,
proceeded to explore the channel.  The stream was the same which
ran out by the seat on which Irene and her king-papa had sat as I
have told, and the goblin creatures found it jolly fun to get out
for a romp on a smooth lawn such as they had never seen in all
their poor miserable lives.  But although they had partaken enough
of the nature of their owners to delight in annoying and alarming
any of the people whom they met on the mountain, they were, of
course, incapable of designs of their own, or of intentionally
furthering those of their masters.

For several nights after the men-at-arms were at length of one mind
as to the fact of the visits of some horrible creatures, whether
bodily or spectral they could not yet say, they watched with
special attention that part of the garden where they had last seen
them.  Perhaps indeed they gave in consequence too little attention
to the house.  But the creatures were too cunning to be easily
caught; nor were the watchers quick-eyed enough to descry the head,
or the keen eyes in it, which, from the opening whence the stream
issued, would watch them in turn, ready, the moment they should
leave the lawn, to report the place clear.



CHAPTER 14
That Night Week


During the whole of the week Irene had been thinking every other
moment of her promise to the old lady, although even now she could
not feel quite sure that she had not been dreaming.  Could it
really be that an old lady lived up in the top of the house, with
pigeons and a spinning-wheel, and a lamp that never went out?  She
was, however, none the less determined, on the coming Friday, to
ascend the three stairs, walk through the passages with the many
doors, and try to find the tower in which she had either seen or
dreamed her grandmother.

Her nurse could not help wondering what had come to the child - she
would sit so thoughtfully silent, and even in the midst of a game
with her would so suddenly fall into a dreamy mood.  But Irene took
care to betray nothing, whatever efforts Lootie might make to get
at her thoughts.  And Lootie had to say to herself: 'What an odd
child she is!' and give it up.
At length the longed-for Friday arrived, and lest Lootie should be
moved to watch her, Irene endeavoured to keep herself as quiet as
possible.  In the afternoon she asked for her doll's house, and
went on arranging and rearranging the various rooms and their
inhabitants for a whole hour.  Then she gave a sigh and threw
herself back in her chair.  One of the dolls would not sit, and
another would not stand, and they were all very tiresome.  Indeed,
there was one would not even lie down, which was too bad.  But it
was now getting dark, and the darker it got the more excited Irene
became, and the more she felt it necessary to be composed.

'I see you want your tea, princess,' said the nurse: 'I will go and
get it.  The room feels close: I will open the window a little.
The evening is mild: it won't hurt you.'

'There's no fear of that, Lootie,' said Irene, wishing she had put
off going for the tea till it was darker, when she might have made
her attempt with every advantage.

I fancy Lootie was longer in returning than she had intended; for
when Irene, who had been lost in thought, looked up, she saw it was
nearly dark, and at the same moment caught sight of a pair of eyes,
bright with a green light, glowering at her through the open
window.  The next instant something leaped into the room.  It was
like a cat, with legs as long as a horse's, Irene said, but its
body no bigger and its legs no thicker than those of a cat.  She
was too frightened to cry out, but not too frightened to jump from
her chair and run from the room.

It is plain enough to every one of my readers what she ought to
have done - and indeed,Irene thought of it herself; but when she
came to the foot of the old stair, just outside the nursery door,
she imagined the creature running up those long ascents after her,
and pursuing her through the dark passages - which, after all,
might lead to no tower!  That thought was too much.  Her heart
failed her, and, turning from the stair, she rushed along to the
hall, whence, finding the front door open, she darted into the
court pursued - at least she thought so - by the creature.  No one
happening to see her, on she ran, unable to think for fear, and
ready to run anywhere to elude the awful creature with the
stilt-legs.  Not daring to look behind her, she rushed straight out
of the gate and up the mountain.  It was foolish indeed - thus to
run farther and farther from all who could help her, as if she had
been seeking a fit spot for the goblin creature to eat her in his
leisure; but that is the way fear serves us: it always sides with
the thing we are afraid of.

The princess was soon out of breath with running uphill; but she
ran on, for she fancied the horrible creature just behind her,
forgetting that, had it been after her such long legs as those must
have overtaken her long ago.  At last she could run no longer, and
fell, unable even to scream, by the roadside, where she lay for
some time half dead with terror.  But finding nothing lay hold of
her, and her breath beginning to come back, she ventured at length
to get half up and peer anxiously about her.  It was now so dark
she could see nothing.  Not a single star was out.  She could not
even tell in what direction the house lay, and between her and home
she fancied the dreadful creature lying ready to pounce upon her.
She saw now that she ought to have run up the stairs at once.  It
was well she did not scream; for, although very few of the goblins
had come out for weeks, a stray idler or two might have heard her.
She sat down upon a stone, and nobody but one who had done
something wrong could have been more miserable.  She had quite
forgotten her promise to visit her grandmother.  A raindrop fell on
her face.  She looked up, and for a moment her terror was lost in
astonishment.  At first she thought the rising moon had left her
place, and drawn nigh to see what could be the matter with the
little girl, sitting alone, without hat or cloak, on the dark bare
mountain; but she soon saw she was mistaken, for there was no light
on the ground at her feet, and no shadow anywhere.  But a great
silver globe was hanging in the air; and as she gazed at the lovely
thing, her courage revived.  If she were but indoors again, she
would fear nothing, not even the terrible creature with the long
legs!  But how was she to find her way back?  What could that light
be?  Could it be -? No, it couldn't.  But what if it should be -
yes - it must be - her great-great-grandmother's lamp, which guided
her pigeons home through the darkest night!  She jumped up: she had
but to keep that light in view and she must find the house.  Her
heart grew strong.  Speedily, yet softly, she walked down the hill,
hoping to pass the watching creature unseen.  Dark as it was, there
was little danger now of choosing the wrong road.  And - which was
most strange - the light that filled her eyes from the lamp,
instead of blinding them for a moment to the object upon which they
next fell, enabled her for a moment to see it, despite the
darkness.  By looking at the lamp and then dropping her eyes, she
could see the road for a yard or two in front of her, and this
saved her from several falls, for the road was very rough.  But all
at once, to her dismay, it vanished, and the terror of the beast,
which had left her the moment she began to return, again laid hold
of her heart.  The same instant, however, she caught the light of
the windows, and knew exactly where she was.  It was too dark to
run, but she made what haste she could, and reached the gate in
safety.  She found the house door still open, ran through the hall,
and, without even looking into the nursery, bounded straight up the
stair, and the next, and the next; then turning to the right, ran
through the long avenue of silent rooms, and found her way at once
to the door at the foot of the tower stair.

When first the nurse missed her, she fancied she was playing her a
trick, and for some time took no trouble about her; but at last,
getting frightened, she had begun to search; and when the princess
entered, the whole household was hither and thither over the house,
hunting for her.  A few seconds after she reached the stair of the
tower they had even begun to search the neglected rooms, in which
they would never have thought of looking had they not already
searched every other place they could think of in vain.  But by
this time she was knocking at the old lady's door.


CHAPTER 15
Woven and Then Spun

'Come in, Irene,' said the silvery voice of her grandmother.

The princess opened the door and peeped in.  But the room was quite
dark and there was no sound of the spinning-wheel.  She grew
frightened once more, thinking that, although the room was there,
the old lady might be a dream after all.  Every little girl knows
how dreadful it is to find a room empty where she thought somebody
was; but Irene had to fancy for a moment that the person she came
to find was nowhere at all.  She remembered, however, that at night
she spun only in the moonlight, and concluded that must be why
there was no sweet, bee-like humming: the old lady might be
somewhere in the darkness.  Before she had time to think another
thought, she heard her voice again, saying as before: 'Come in,
Irene.'  From the sound, she understood at once that she was not in
the room beside her.  Perhaps she was in her bedroom.  She turned
across the passage, feeling her way to the other door.  When her
hand fell on the lock, again the old lady spoke:

'Shut the other door behind you, Irene.  I always close the door of
my workroom when I go to my chamber.'

Irene wondered to hear her voice so plainly through the door:
having shut the other, she opened it and went in.  Oh, what a
lovely haven to reach from the darkness and fear through which she
had come!  The soft light made her feel as if she were going into
the heart of the milkiest pearl; while the blue walls and their
silver stars for a moment perplexed her with the fancy that they
were in reality the sky which she had left outside a minute ago
covered with rainclouds.

'I've lighted a fire for you, Irene: you're cold and wet,' said her
grandmother.

Then Irene looked again, and saw that what she had taken for a huge
bouquet of red roses on a low stand against the wall was in fact a
fire which burned in the shapes of the loveliest and reddest roses,
glowing gorgeously between the heads and wings of two cherubs of
shining silver.  And when she came nearer, she found that the smell
of roses with which the room was filled came from the fire-roses on
the hearth.  Her grandmother was dressed in the loveliest pale blue
velvet, over which her hair, no longer white, but of a rich golden
colour, streamed like a cataract, here falling in dull gathered
heaps, there rushing away in smooth shining falls.  And ever as she
looked, the hair seemed pouring down from her head and vanishing in
a golden mist ere it reached the floor.  It flowed from under the
edge of a circle of shining silver, set with alternated pearls and
opals.  On her dress was no ornament whatever, neither was there a
ring on her hand, or a necklace or carcanet about her neck.  But
her slippers glimmered with the light of the Milky Way, for they
were covered with seed-pearls and opals in one mass.  Her face was
that of a woman of three-and-twenty.

The princess was so bewildered with astonishment and admiration
that she could hardly thank her, and drew nigh with timidity,
feeling dirty and uncomfortable.  The lady was seated on a low
chair by the side of the fire, with hands outstretched to take her,
but the princess hung back with a troubled smile.

'Why, what's the matter?' asked her grandmother.  'You haven't been
doing anything wrong - I know that by your face, though it is
rather miserable.  What's the matter, my dear?'

And she still held out her arms.

'Dear grandmother,' said Irene, 'I'm not so sure that I haven't
done something wrong.  I ought to have run up to you at once when
the long-legged cat came in at the window, instead of running out
on the mountain and making myself such a fright.'

'You were taken by surprise, my child, and you are not so likely to
do it again.  It is when people do wrong things wilfully that they
are the more likely to do them again.  Come.'

And still she held out her arms.

'But, grandmother, you're so beautiful and grand with your crown
on; and I am so dirty with mud and rain!  I should quite spoil your
beautiful blue dress.'

With a merry little laugh the lady sprung from her chair, more
lightly far than Irene herself could, caught the child to her
bosom, and, kissing the tear-stained face over and over, sat down
with her in her lap.

'Oh, grandmother!  You'll make yourself such a mess!' cried Irene,
clinging to her.

'You darling! do you think I care more for my dress than for my
little girl?  Besides - look here.'

As she spoke she set her down, and Irene saw to her dismay that the
lovely dress was covered with the mud of her fall on the mountain
road.  But the lady stooped to the fire, and taking from it, by the
stalk in her fingers, one of the burning roses, passed it once and
again and a third time over the front of her dress; and when Irene
looked, not a single stain was to be discovered.

'There!' said her grandmother, 'you won't mind coming to me now?'

But Irene again hung back, eying the flaming rose which the lady
held in her hand.

'You're not afraid of the rose - are you?' she said, about to throw
it on the hearth again.
'Oh! don't, please!' cried Irene.  'Won't you hold it to my frock
and my hands and my face?  And I'm afraid my feet and my knees want
it too.'
'No, answered her grandmother, smiling a little sadly, as she threw
the rose from her; 'it is too hot for you yet.  It would set your
frock in a flame.  Besides, I don't want to make you clean tonight.

I want your nurse and the rest of the people to see you as you are,
for you will have to tell them how you ran away for fear of the
long-legged cat.  I should like to wash you, but they would not
believe you then.  Do you see that bath behind you?'

The princess looked, and saw a large oval tub of silver, shining
brilliantly in the light of the wonderful lamp.

'Go and look into it,' said the lady.

Irene went, and came back very silent with her eyes shining.

'What did you see?' asked her grandmother.

'The sky, and the moon and the stars,' she answered.  'It looked as
if there was no bottom to it.'

The lady smiled a pleased satisfied smile, and was silent also for
a few moments.  Then she said:

'Any time you want a bath, come to me.  I know YOU have a bath
every morning, but sometimes you want one at night, too.'

'Thank you, grandmother; I will - I will indeed,' answered Irene,
and was again silent for some moments thinking.  Then she said:
'How was it, grandmother, that I saw your beautiful lamp - not the
light of it only - but the great round silvery lamp itself, hanging
alone in the great open air, high up?  It was your lamp I saw -
wasn't it?'

'Yes, my child - it was my lamp.'

'Then how was it?  I don't see a window all round.'

'When I please I can make the lamp shine through the walls - shine
so strong that it melts them away from before the sight, and shows
itself as you saw it.  But, as I told you, it is not everybody can
see it.'

'How is it that I can, then?  I'm sure I don't know.'

'It is a gift born with you.  And one day I hope everybody will
have it.'

'But how do you make it shine through the walls?'

'Ah! that you would not understand if I were to try ever so much to
make you - not yet - not yet.  But,' added the lady, rising, 'you
must sit in my chair while I get you the present I have been
preparing for you.  I told you my spinning was for you.  It is
finished now, and I am going to fetch it.  I have been keeping it
warm under one of my brooding pigeons.'

Irene sat down in the low chair, and her grandmother left her,
shutting the door behind her.  The child sat gazing, now at the
rose fire, now at the starry walls, now at the silver light; and a
great quietness grew in her heart.  If all the long-legged cats in
the world had come rushing at her then she would not have been
afraid of them for a moment.  How this was she could not tell - she
only knew there was no fear in her, and everything was so right and
safe that it could not get in.

She had been gazing at the lovely lamp for some minutes fixedly:
turning her eyes, she found the wall had vanished, for she was
looking out on the dark cloudy night.  But though she heard the
wind blowing, none of it blew upon her.  In a moment more the
clouds themselves parted, or rather vanished like the wall, and she
looked straight into the starry herds, flashing gloriously in the
dark blue.  It was but for a moment.  The clouds gathered again and
shut out the stars; the wall gathered again and shut out the
clouds; and there stood the lady beside her with the loveliest
smile on her face, and a shimmering ball in her hand, about the
size of a pigeon's egg.

'There, Irene; there is my work for you!' she said, holding out the
ball to the princess.

She took it in her hand, and looked at it all over.  It sparkled a
little, and shone here and there, but not much.  It was of a sort
of grey-whiteness, something like spun glass.

'Is this all your spinning, grandmother?' she asked.

'All since you came to the house.  There is more there than you
think.'

'How pretty it is!  What am I to do with it, please?'

'That I will now explain to you,' answered the lady, turning from
her and going to her cabinet.  She came back with a small ring in
her hand.  Then she took the ball from Irene's, and did something
with the ring - Irene could not tell what.

'Give me your hand,' she said.  Irene held up her right hand.

'Yes, that is the hand I want,' said the lady, and put the ring on
the forefinger of it.

'What a beautiful ring!' said Irene.  'What is the stone called?'

'It is a fire-opal.'
'Please, am I to keep it?'

'Always.'
'Oh, thank you, grandmother!  It's prettier than anything I ever
saw, except those - of all colours-in your - Please, is that your
crown?'

'Yes, it is my crown.  The stone in your ring is of the same sort
- only not so good.  It has only red, but mine have all colours,
you see.'

'Yes, grandmother.  I will take such care of it!  But -' she added,
hesitating.

'But what?' asked her grandmother.

'What am I to say when Lootie asks me where I got it?'

'You will ask her where you got it,' answered the lady smiling.

'I don't see how I can do that.'

'You will, though.'

'Of course I will, if you say so.  But, you know, I can't pretend
not to know.'

'Of course not.  But don't trouble yourself about it.  You will see
when the time comes.'

So saying, the lady turned, and threw the little ball into the rose
fire.

'Oh, grandmother!' exclaimed Irene; 'I thought you had spun it for
me.'

'So I did, my child.  And you've got it.'

'No; it's burnt in the fire!'

The lady put her hand in the fire, brought out the ball, glimmering
as before, and held it towards her.  Irene stretched out her hand
to take it, but the lady turned and, going to her cabinet, opened
a drawer, and laid the ball in it.

'Have I done anything to vex you, grandmother?' said Irene
pitifully.

'No, my darling.  But you must understand that no one ever gives
anything to another properly and really without keeping it.  That
ball is yours.'

'Oh! I'm not to take it with me!  You are going to keep it for me!'

'You are to take it with you.  I've fastened the end of it to the
ring on your finger.'

Irene looked at the ring.

'I can't see it there, grandmother,' she said.

'Feel - a little way from the ring - towards the cabinet,' said the
lady.

'Oh! I do feel it!' exclaimed the princess.  'But I can't see it,'
she added, looking close to her outstretched hand.

'No.  The thread is too fine for you to see it.  You can only feel
it.  Now you can fancy how much spinning that took, although it
does seem such a little ball.'

'But what use can I make of it, if it lies in your cabinet?'

'That is what I will explain to you.  It would be of no use to you
- it wouldn't be yours at all if it did not lie in my cabinet.  Now
listen.  If ever you find yourself in any danger - such, for
example, as you were in this same evening - you must take off your
ring and put it under the pillow of your bed.  Then you must lay
your finger, the same that wore the ring, upon the thread, and
follow the thread wherever it leads you.'

'Oh, how delightful!  It will lead me to you, grandmother, I know!'

'Yes.  But, remember, it may seem to you a very roundabout way
indeed, and you must not doubt the thread.  Of one thing you may be
sure, that while you hold it, I hold it too.'

'It is very wonderful!' said Irene thoughtfully.  Then suddenly
becoming aware, she jumped up, crying:

'Oh, grandmother! here have I been sitting all this time in your
chair, and you standing!  I beg your pardon.'

The lady laid her hand on her shoulder, and said:

'Sit down again, Irene.  Nothing pleases me better than to see
anyone sit in my chair.  I am only too glad to stand so long as
anyone will sit in it.'

'How kind of you!' said the princess, and sat down again.

'It makes me happy,' said the lady.

'But,' said Irene, still puzzled, 'won't the thread get in
somebody's way and be broken, if the one end is fast to my ring,
and the other laid in your cabinet?'

'You will find all that arrange itself.  I am afraid it is time for
you to go.'

'Mightn't I stay and sleep with you tonight, grandmother?'
'No, not tonight.  If I had meant you to stay tonight, I should
have given you a bath; but you know everybody in the house is
miserable about you, and it would be cruel to keep them so all
night.  You must go downstairs.'

'I'm so glad, grandmother, you didn't say "Go home," for this is my
home.  Mayn't I call this my home?'

'You may, my child.  And I trust you will always think it your
home.  Now come.  I must take you back without anyone seeing you.'

'Please, I want to ask you one question more,' said Irene.  'Is it
because you have your crown on that you look so young?'

'No, child,' answered her grandmother; 'it is because I felt so
young this evening that I put my crown on.  And I thought you would
like to see your old grandmother in her best.'

'Why do you call yourself old?  You're not old, grandmother.'

'I am very old indeed.  It is so silly of people - I don't mean
you, for you are such a tiny, and couldn't know better - but it is
so silly of people to fancy that old age means crookedness and
witheredness and feebleness and sticks and spectacles and
rheumatism and forgetfulness!  It is so silly! Old age has nothing
whatever to do with all that.  The right old age means strength and
beauty and mirth and courage and clear eyes and strong painless
limbs.  I am older than you are able to think, and -'

'And look at you, grandmother!' cried Irene, jumping up and
flinging her arms about her neck.  'I won't be so silly again, I
promise you.  At least - I'm rather afraid to promise - but if I
am, I promise to be sorry for it - I do.  I wish I were as old as
you, grandmother.  I don't think you are ever afraid of anything.'

'Not for long, at least, my child.  Perhaps by the time I am two
thousand years of age, I shall, indeed, never be afraid of
anything.  But I confess I have sometimes been afraid about my
children - sometimes about you, Irene.'

'Oh, I'm so sorry, grandmother!  Tonight, I suppose, you mean.'

'Yes - a little tonight; but a good deal when you had all but made
up your mind that I was a dream, and no real
great-great-grandmother.  You must not suppose I am blaming you for
that.  I dare say you could not help it.'

'I don't know, grandmother,' said the princess, beginning to cry.
'I can't always do myself as I should like.  And I don't always
try.  I'm very sorry anyhow.'

The lady stooped, lifted her in her arms, and sat down with her in
her chair, holding her close to her bosom.  In a few minutes the
princess had sobbed herself to sleep.  How long she slept I do not
know.  When she came to herself she was sitting in her own high
chair at the nursery table, with her doll's house before her.



CHAPTER 16
The Ring


The same moment her nurse came into the room, sobbing.  When she
saw her sitting there she started back with a loud cry of amazement
and joy.  Then running to her, she caught her in her arms and
covered her with kisses.

'My precious darling princess! where have you been?  What has
happened to you?  We've all been crying our eyes out, and searching
the house from top to bottom for you.'

'Not quite from the top,' thought Irene to herself; and she might
have added, 'not quite to the bottom', perhaps, if she had known
all.  But the one she would not, and the other she could not say.
'Oh, Lootie! I've had such a dreadful adventure!' she replied, and
told her all about the cat with the long legs, and how she ran out
upon the mountain, and came back again.  But she said nothing of
her grandmother or her lamp.

'And there we've been searching for you all over the house for more
than an hour and a half!' exclaimed the nurse.  'But that's no
matter, now we've got you!  Only, princess, I must say,' she added,
her mood changing, 'what you ought to have done was to call for
your own Lootie to come and help you, instead of running out of the
house, and up the mountain, in that wild, I must say, foolish
fashion.'

'Well, Lootie,' said Irene quietly, 'perhaps if you had a big cat,
all legs, running at you, you might not exactly know what was the
wisest thing to do at the moment.'

'I wouldn't run up the mountain, anyhow,' returned Lootie.

'Not if you had time to think about it.  But when those creatures
came at you that night on the mountain, you were so frightened
yourself that you lost your way home.'

This put a stop to Lootie's reproaches.  She had been on the point
of saying that the long-legged cat must have been a twilight fancy
of the princess's, but the memory of the horrors of that night, and
of the talking-to which the king had given her in consequence,
prevented her from saying what after all she did not half believe
- having a strong suspicion that the cat was a goblin; for she knew
nothing of the difference between the goblins and their creatures:
she counted them all just goblins.

Without another word she went and got some fresh tea and bread and
butter for the princess.  Before she returned, the whole household,
headed by the housekeeper, burst into the nursery to exult over
their darling.  The gentlemen-at-arms followed, and were ready
enough to believe all she told them about the long-legged cat.
Indeed, though wise enough to say nothing about it, they
remembered, with no little horror, just such a creature amongst
those they had surprised at their gambols upon the princess's lawn.

In their own hearts they blamed themselves for not having kept
better watch.  And their captain gave orders that from this night
the front door and all the windows on the ground floor should be
locked immediately the sun set, and opened after upon no pretence
whatever.  The men-at-arms redoubled their vigilance, and for some
time there was no further cause of alarm.

When the princess woke the next morning, her nurse was bending over
her.  'How your ring does glow this morning, princess! - just like
a fiery rose!' she said.

'Does it, Lootie?' returned Irene.  'Who gave me the ring, Lootie?
I know I've had it a long time, but where did I get it?  I don't
remember.'
'I think it must have been your mother gave it you, princess; but
really, for as long as you have worn it, I don't remember that ever
I heard,' answered her nurse.

'I will ask my king-papa the next time he comes,' said Irene.



CHAPTER 17
Springtime


The spring so dear to all creatures, young and old, came at last,
and before the first few days of it had gone, the king rode through
its budding valleys to see his little daughter.  He had been in a
distant part of his dominions all the winter, for he was not in the
habit of stopping in one great city, or of visiting only his
favourite country houses, but he moved from place to place, that
all his people might know him.  Wherever he journeyed, he kept a
constant look-out for the ablest and best men to put into office;
and wherever he found himself mistaken, and those he had appointed
incapable or unjust, he removed them at once.  Hence you see it was
his care of the people that kept him from seeing his princess so
often as he would have liked.  You may wonder why he did not take
her about with him; but there were several reasons against his
doing so, and I suspect her great-great-grandmother had had a
principal hand in preventing it.  Once more Irene heard the
bugle-blast, and once more she was at the gate to meet her father
as he rode up on his great white horse.

After they had been alone for a little while, she thought of what
she had resolved to ask him.
'Please, king-papa,' she said, 'Will you tell me where I got this
pretty ring?  I can't remember.'

The king looked at it.  A strange beautiful smile spread like
sunshine over his face, and an answering smile, but at the same
time a questioning one, spread like moonlight over Irene's.  'It
was your queen-mamma's once,' he said.

'And why isn't it hers now?' asked Irene.

'She does not want it now,' said the king, looking grave.

'Why doesn't she want it now?'

'Because she's gone where all those rings are made.'

'And when shall I see her?' asked the princess.

'Not for some time yet,' answered the king, and the tears came into
his eyes.

Irene did not remember her mother and did not know why her father
looked so, and why the tears came in his eyes; but she put her arms
round his neck and kissed him, and asked no more questions.

The king was much disturbed on hearing the report of the
gentlemen-at-arms concerning the creatures they had seen; and I
presume would have taken Irene with him that very day, but for what
the presence of the ring on her finger assured him of.  About an
hour before he left, Irene saw him go up the old stair; and he did
not come down again till they were just ready to start; and she
thought with herself that he had been up to see the old lady.  When
he went away he left other six gentlemen behind him, that there
might be six of them always on guard.

And now, in the lovely spring weather, Irene was out on the
mountain the greater part of the day.  In the warmer hollows there
were lovely primroses, and not so many that she ever got tired of
them.  As often as she saw a new one opening an eye of light in the
blind earth, she would clap her hands with gladness, and unlike
some children I know, instead of pulling it, would touch it as
tenderly as if it had been a new baby, and, having made its
acquaintance, would leave it as happy as she found it.  She treated
the plants on which they grew like birds' nests; every fresh flower
was like a new little bird to her.  She would pay visits to all the
flower-nests she knew, remembering each by itself.  She would go
down on her hands and knees beside one and say: 'Good morning!  Are
you all smelling very sweet this morning?  Good-bye!' and then she
would go to another nest, and say the same.  It was a favourite
amusement with her.  There were many flowers up and down, and she
loved them all, but the primroses were her favourites.

'They're not too shy, and they're not a bit forward,' she would say
to Lootie.
There were goats too about, over the mountain, and when the little
kids came she was as pleased with them as with the flowers.  The
goats belonged to the miners mostly-a few of them to Curdie's
mother; but there were a good many wild ones that seemed to belong
to nobody.  These the goblins counted theirs, and it was upon them
partly that they lived.  They set snares and dug pits for them; and
did not scruple to take what tame ones happened to be caught; but
they did not try to steal them in any other manner, because they
were afraid of the dogs the hill-people kept to watch them, for the
knowing dogs always tried to bite their feet.  But the goblins had
a kind of sheep of their own - very queer creatures, which they
drove out to feed at night, and the other goblin creatures were
wise enough to keep good watch over them, for they knew they should
have their bones by and by.



CHAPTER 18
Curdie's Clue


Curdie was as watchful as ever, but was almost getting tired of his
ill success.  Every other night or so he followed the goblins
about, as they went on digging and boring, and getting as near them
as he could, watched them from behind stones and rocks; but as yet
he seemed no nearer finding out what they had in view.  As at
first, he always kept hold of the end of his string, while his
pickaxe, left just outside the hole by which he entered the
goblins' country from the mine, continued to serve as an anchor and
hold fast the other end.  The goblins, hearing no more noise in
that quarter, had ceased to apprehend an immediate invasion, and
kept no watch.

One night, after dodging about and listening till he was nearly
falling asleep with weariness, he began to roll up his ball, for he
had resolved to go home to bed.  It was not long, however, before
he began to feel bewildered.  One after another he passed goblin
houses, caves, that is, occupied by goblin families, and at length
was sure they were many more than he had passed as he came.  He had
to use great caution to pass unseen - they lay so close together.
Could his string have led him wrong?  He still followed winding it,
and still it led him into more thickly populated quarters, until he
became quite uneasy, and indeed apprehensive; for although he was
not afraid of the cobs, he was afraid of not finding his way out.
But what could he do?  It was of no use to sit down and wait for
the morning - the morning made no difference here.  It was dark,
and always dark; and if his string failed him he was helpless.  He
might even arrive within a yard of the mine and never know it.
Seeing he could do nothing better he would at least find where the
end of his string was, and, if possible, how it had come to play
him such a trick.  He knew by the size of the ball that he was
getting pretty near the last of it, when he began to feel a tugging
and pulling at it.  What could it mean?  Turning a sharp corner, he
thought he heard strange sounds.  These grew, as he went on, to a
scuffling and growling and squeaking; and the noise increased,
until, turning a second sharp corner, he found himself in the midst
of it, and the same moment tumbled over a wallowing mass, which he
knew must be a knot of the cobs' creatures.  Before he could
recover his feet, he had caught some great scratches on his face
and several severe bites on his legs and arms.  But as he scrambled
to get up, his hand fell upon his pickaxe, and before the horrid
beasts could do him any serious harm, he was laying about with it
right and left in the dark.  The hideous cries which followed gave
him the satisfaction of knowing that he had punished some of them
pretty smartly for their rudeness, and by their scampering and
their retreating howls, he perceived that he had routed them.  He
stood for a little, weighing his battle-axe in his hand as if it
had been the most precious lump of metal - but indeed no lump of
gold itself could have been so precious at the time as that common
tool - then untied the end of the string from it, put the ball in
his pocket, and still stood thinking.  It was clear that the cobs'
creatures had found his axe, had between them carried it off, and
had so led him he knew not where.  But for all his thinking he
could not tell what he ought to do, until suddenly he became aware
of a glimmer of light in the distance.  Without a moment's
hesitation he set out for it, as fast as the unknown and rugged way
would permit.  Yet again turning a corner, led by the dim light, he
spied something quite new in his experience of the underground
regions - a small irregular shape of something shining.  Going up
to it, he found it was a piece of mica, or Muscovy glass, called
sheep-silver in Scotland, and the light flickered as if from a fire
behind it.  After trying in vain for some time to discover an
entrance to the place where it was burning, he came at length to a
small chamber in which an opening, high in the wall, revealed a
glow beyond.  To this opening he managed to scramble up, and then
he saw a strange sight.

Below sat a little group of goblins around a fire, the smoke of
which vanished in the darkness far aloft.  The sides of the cave
were full of shining minerals like those of the palace hall; and
the company was evidently of a superior order, for every one wore
stones about head, or arms, or waist, shining dull gorgeous colours
in the light of the fire.  Nor had Curdie looked long before he
recognized the king himself, and found that he had made his way
into the inner apartment of the royal family.  He had never had
such a good chance of hearing something.  He crept through the hole
as softly as he could, scrambled a good way down the wall towards
them without attracting attention, and then sat down and listened.
The king, evidently the queen, and probably the crown prince and
the Prime Minister were talking together.  He was sure of the queen
by her shoes, for as she warmed her feet at the fire, he saw them
quite plainly.

'That will be fun!' said the one he took for the crown prince.
It was the first whole sentence he heard.

'I don't see why you should think it such a grand affair!' said his
stepmother, tossing her head backward.

'You must remember, my spouse,' interposed His Majesty, as if
making excuse for his son, 'he has got the same blood in him.  His
mother -'

'Don't talk to me of his mother!  You positively encourage his
unnatural fancies.  Whatever belongs to that mother ought to be cut
out of him.'

'You forget yourself, my dear!' said the king.

'I don't,' said the queen, 'nor you either.  If you expect me to
approve of such coarse tastes, you will find yourself mistaken.  I
don't wear shoes for nothing.'

'You must acknowledge, however,' the king said, with a little
groan, 'that this at least is no whim of Harelip's, but a matter of
State policy.  You are well aware that his gratification comes
purely from the pleasure of sacrificing himself to the public good.

Does it not, Harelip?'

'Yes, father; of course it does.  Only it will be nice to make her
cry.  I'll have the skin taken off between her toes, and tie them
up till they grow together.  Then her feet will be like other
people's, and there will be no occasion for her to wear shoes.'

'Do you mean to insinuate I've got toes, you unnatural wretch?'
cried the queen; and she moved angrily towards Harelip.  The
councillor, however, who was betwixt them, leaned forward so as to
prevent her touching him, but only as if to address the prince.

'Your Royal Highness,' he said, 'possibly requires to be reminded
that you have got three toes yourself - one on one foot, two on the
other.'

'Ha! ha! ha!' shouted the queen triumphantly.

The councillor, encouraged by this mark of favour, went on.

'It seems to me, Your Royal Highness, it would greatly endear you
to your future people, proving to them that you are not the less
one of themselves that you had the misfortune to be born of a
sun-mother, if you were to command upon yourself the comparatively
slight operation which, in a more extended form, you so wisely
meditate with regard to your future princess.'

'Ha! ha! ha!' laughed the queen louder than before, and the king
and the minister joined in the laugh.  Harelip growled, and for a
few moments the others continued to express their enjoyment of his
discomfiture.

The queen was the only one Curdie could see with any distinctness.
She sat sideways to him, and the light of the fire shone full upon
her face.  He could not consider her handsome.  Her nose was
certainly broader at the end than its extreme length, and her eyes,
instead of being horizontal, were set up like two perpendicular
eggs, one on the broad, the other on the small end.  Her mouth was
no bigger than a small buttonhole until she laughed, when it
stretched from ear to ear - only, to be sure, her ears were very
nearly in the middle of her cheeks.

Anxious to hear everything they might say, Curdie ventured to slide
down a smooth part of the rock just under him, to a projection
below, upon which he thought to rest.  But whether he was not
careful enough, or the projection gave way, down he came with a
rush on the floor of the cavern, bringing with him a great rumbling
shower of stones.

The goblins jumped from their seats in more anger than
consternation, for they had never yet seen anything to be afraid of
in the palace.  But when they saw Curdie with his pick in his hand
their rage was mingled with fear, for they took him for the first
of an invasion of miners.  The king notwithstanding drew himself up
to his full height of four feet, spread himself to his full breadth
of three and a half, for he was the handsomest and squarest of all
the goblins, and strutting up to Curdie, planted himself with
outspread feet before him, and said with dignity:

'Pray what right have you in my palace?'

'The right of necessity, Your Majesty,' answered Curdie.  'I lost
my way and did not know where I was wandering to.'

'How did you get in?'

'By a hole in the mountain.'

'But you are a miner!  Look at your pickaxe!'

Curdie did look at it, answering:

'I came upon it lying on the ground a little way from here.  I
tumbled over some wild beasts who were playing with it.  Look, Your
Majesty.'  And Curdie showed him how he was scratched and bitten.

The king was pleased to find him behave more politely than he had
expected from what his people had told him concerning the miners,
for he attributed it to the power of his own presence; but he did
not therefore feel friendly to the intruder.

'You will oblige me by walking out of my dominions at once,' he
said, well knowing what a mockery lay in the words.

'With pleasure, if Your Majesty will give me a guide,' said Curdie.

'I will give you a thousand,' said the king with a scoffing air of
magnificent liberality.

'One will be quite sufficient,' said Curdie.

But the king uttered a strange shout, half halloo, half roar, and
in rushed goblins till the cave was swarming.  He said something to
the first of them which Curdie could not hear, and it was passed
from one to another till in a moment the farthest in the crowd had
evidently heard and understood it.  They began to gather about him
in a way he did not relish, and he retreated towards the wall.
They pressed upon him.

'Stand back,' said Curdie, grasping his pickaxe tighter by his
knee.

They only grinned and pressed closer.  Curdie bethought himself and
began to rhyme.


'Ten, twenty, thirty -
You're all so very dirty!
Twenty, thirty, forty -
You're all so thick and snorty!
'Thirty, forty, fifty -
You're all so puff-and-snifty!
Forty, fifty, sixty -
Beast and man so mixty!

'Fifty, sixty, seventy -
Mixty, maxty, leaventy!
Sixty, seventy, eighty -
All your cheeks so slaty!

'Seventy, eighty, ninety,
All your hands so flinty!
Eighty, ninety, hundred,
Altogether dundred!'


The goblins fell back a little when he began, and made horrible
grimaces all through the rhyme, as if eating something so
disagreeable that it set their teeth on edge and gave them the
creeps; but whether it was that the rhyming words were most of them
no words at all, for, a new rhyme being considered the more
efficacious, Curdie had made it on the spur of the moment, or
whether it was that the presence of the king and queen gave them
courage, I cannot tell; but the moment the rhyme was over they
crowded on him again, and out shot a hundred long arms, with a
multitude of thick nailless fingers at the ends of them, to lay
hold upon him.  Then Curdie heaved up his axe.  But being as gentle
as courageous and not wishing to kill any of them, he turned the
end which was square and blunt like a hammer, and with that came
down a great blow on the head of the goblin nearest him.  Hard as
the heads of all goblins are, he thought he must feel that.  And so
he did, no doubt; but he only gave a horrible cry, and sprung at
Curdie's throat.  Curdie, however, drew back in time, and just at
that critical moment remembered the vulnerable part of the goblin
body.  He made a sudden rush at the king and stamped with all his
might on His Majesty's feet.  The king gave a most unkingly howl
and almost fell into the fire.  Curdie then rushed into the crowd,
stamping right and left.  The goblins drew back, howling on every
side as he approached, but they were so crowded that few of those
he attacked could escape his tread; and the shrieking and roaring
that filled the cave would have appalled Curdie but for the good
hope it gave him.  They were tumbling over each other in heaps in
their eagerness to rush from the cave, when a new assailant
suddenly faced him - the queen, with flaming eyes and expanded
nostrils, her hair standing half up from her head, rushed at him.
She trusted in her shoes: they were of granite - hollowed like
French sabots.  Curdie would have endured much rather than hurt a
woman, even if she was a goblin; but here was an affair of life and
death: forgetting her shoes, he made a great stamp on one of her
feet.  But she instantly returned it with very different effect,
causing him frightful pain, and almost disabling him.  His only
chance with her would have been to attack the granite shoes with
his pickaxe, but before he could think of that she had caught him
up in her arms and was rushing with him across the cave.  She
dashed him into a hole in the wall, with a force that almost
stunned him.  But although he could not move, he was not too far
gone to hear her great cry, and the rush of multitudes of soft
feet, followed by the sounds of something heaved up against the
rock; after which came a multitudinous patter of stones falling
near him.  The last had not ceased when he grew very faint, for his
head had been badly cut, and at last insensible.

When he came to himself there was perfect silence about him, and
utter darkness, but for the merest glimmer in one tiny spot.  He
crawled to it, and found that they had heaved a slab against the
mouth of the hole, past the edge of which a poor little gleam found
its way from the fire.  He could not move it a hairbreadth, for
they had piled a great heap of stones against it.  He crawled back
to where he had been lying, in the faint hope of finding his
pickaxe, But after a vain search he was at last compelled to
acknowledge himself in an evil plight.  He sat down and tried to
think, but soon fell fast asleep.



CHAPTER 19
Goblin Counsels


He must have slept a long time, for when he awoke he felt
wonderfully restored - indeed almost well - and very hungry.  There
were voices in the outer cave.

Once more, then, it was night; for the goblins slept during the day
and went about their affairs during the night.

In the universal and constant darkness of their dwelling they had
no reason to prefer the one arrangement to the other; but from
aversion to the sun-people they chose to be busy when there was
least chance of their being met either by the miners below, when
they were burrowing, or by the people of the mountain above, when
they were feeding their sheep or catching their goats.  And indeed
it was only when the sun was away that the outside of the mountain
was sufficiently like their own dismal regions to be endurable to
their mole eyes, so thoroughly had they become unaccustomed to any
light beyond that of their own fires and torches.

Curdie listened, and soon found that they were talking of himself.

'How long will it take?' asked Harelip.

'Not many days, I should think,' answered the king.  'They are poor
feeble creatures, those sun-people, and want to be always eating.
We can go a week at a time without food, and be all the better for
it; but I've been told they eat two or three times every day!  Can
you believe it?  They must be quite hollow inside - not at all like
us, nine-tenths of whose bulk is solid flesh and bone.  Yes - I
judge a week of starvation will do for him.'
'If I may be allowed a word,' interposed the queen, - 'and I think
I ought to have some voice in the matter -'

'The wretch is entirely at your disposal, my spouse,' interrupted
the king.  'He is your property.  You caught him yourself.We should
never have done it.'

The queen laughed.  She seemed in far better humour than the night
before.

'I was about to say,' she resumed, 'that it does seem a pity to
waste so much fresh meat.'

'What are you thinking of, my love?' said the king.  'The very
notion of starving him implies that we are not going to give him
any meat, either salt or fresh.'

'I'm not such a stupid as that comes to,' returned Her Majesty.
'What I mean is that by the time he is starved there will hardly be
a picking upon his bones.'

The king gave a great laugh.

'Well, my spouse, you may have him when you like,' he said.  'I
don't fancy him for my part.  I am pretty sure he is tough eating.'

'That would be to honour instead of punish his insolence,' returned
the queen.  'But why should our poor creatures be deprived of so
much nourishment?  Our little dogs and cats and pigs and small
bears would enjoy him very much.'

'You are the best of housekeepers, my lovely queen!' said her
husband.  'Let it be so by all means.  Let us have our people in,
and get him out and kill him at once.  He deserves it.  The
mischief he might have brought upon us, now that he had penetrated
so far as our most retired citadel, is incalculable.  Or rather let
us tie him hand and foot, and have the pleasure of seeing him torn
to pieces by full torchlight in the great hall.'

'Better and better!' cried the queen and the prince together, both
of them clapping their hands.  And the prince made an ugly noise
with his hare-lip, just as if he had intended to be one at the
feast.

'But,' added the queen, bethinking herself, 'he is so troublesome.
For poor creatures as they are, there is something about those
sun-people that is very troublesome.  I cannot imagine how it is
that with such superior strength and skill and understanding as
ours, we permit them to exist at all.  Why do we not destroy them
entirely, and use their cattle and grazing lands at our pleasure?
Of course we don't want to live in their horrid country!  It is far
too glaring for our quieter and more refined tastes.  But we might
use it as a sort of outhouse, you know.  Even our creatures' eyes
might get used to it, and if they did grow blind that would be of
no consequence, provided they grew fat as well.  But we might even
keep their great cows and other creatures, and then we should have
a few more luxuries, such as cream and cheese, which at present we
only taste occasionally, when our brave men have succeeded in
carrying some off from their farms.'

'It is worth thinking of,' said the king; 'and I don't know why you
should be the first to suggest it, except that you have a positive
genius for conquest.  But still, as you say, there is something
very troublesome about them; and it would be better, as I
understand you to suggest, that we should starve him for a day or
two first, so that he may be a little less frisky when we take him
out.'


'Once there was a goblin
Living in a hole;
Busy he was cobblin'
A shoe without a sole.

'By came a birdie:
"Goblin, what do you do?"
"Cobble at a sturdie
Upper leather shoe."

'"What's the good o' that, Sir?"
Said the little bird.
"Why it's very Pat, Sir -
Plain without a word.

'"Where 'tis all a hole, Sir,
Never can be holes:
Why should their shoes have soles, Sir,
When they've got no souls?"'


'What's that horrible noise?' cried the queen, shuddering from
pot-metal head to granite shoes.

'I declare,' said the king with solemn indignation, 'it's the
sun-creature in the hole!'

'Stop that disgusting noise!' cried the crown prince valiantly,
getting up and standing in front of the heap of stones, with his
face towards Curdie's prison.  'Do now, or I'll break your head.'

'Break away,' shouted Curdie, and began singing again:


'Once there was a goblin, Living in a hole -'


'I really cannot bear it,' said the queen.  'If I could only get at
his horrid toes with my slippers again!'
'I think we had better go to bed,' said the king.

'It's not time to go to bed,' said the queen.

'I would if I was you,' said Curdie.

'Impertinent wretch!' said the queen, with the utmost scorn in her
voice.

'An impossible if,' said His Majesty with dignity.

'Quite,' returned Curdie, and began singing again:


'Go to bed,
Goblin, do.
Help the queen
Take off her shoe.

'If you do,
It will disclose
A horrid set
Of sprouting toes.'


'What a lie!' roared the queen in a rage.

'By the way, that reminds me,' said the king, 'that for as long as
we have been married, I have never seen your feet, queen.  I think
you might take off your shoes when you go to bed!  They positively
hurt me sometimes.'

'I will do as I like,' retorted the queen sulkily.

'You ought to do as your own hubby wishes you,' said the king.

'I will not,' said the queen.

'Then I insist upon it,' said the king.

Apparently His Majesty approached the queen for the purpose of
following the advice given by Curdie, for the latter heard a
scuffle, and then a great roar from the king.

'Will you be quiet, then?' said the queen wickedly.

'Yes, yes, queen.  I only meant to coax you.'

'Hands off!' cried the queen triumphantly.  'I'm going to bed.  You
may come when you like.  But as long as I am queen I will sleep in
my shoes.  It is my royal privilege.  Harelip, go to bed.'

'I'm going,' said Harelip sleepily.

'So am I,' said the king.

'Come along, then,' said the queen; 'and mind you are good, or
I'll -'

'Oh, no, no, no!' screamed the king in the most supplicating of
tones.

Curdie heard only a muttered reply in the distance; and then the
cave was quite still.

They had left the fire burning, and the light came through brighter
than before.  Curdie thought it was time to try again if anything
could be done.  But he found he could not get even a finger through
the chink between the slab and the rock.  He gave a great rush with
his shoulder against the slab, but it yielded no more than if it
had been part of the rock.  All he could do was to sit down and
think again.

By and by he came to the resolution to pretend to be dying, in the
hope they might take him out before his strength was too much
exhausted to let him have a chance.  Then, for the creatures, if he
could but find his axe again, he would have no fear of them; and if
it were not for the queen's horrid shoes, he would have no fear at
all.
Meantime, until they should come again at night, there was nothing
for him to do but forge new rhymes, now his only weapons.  He had
no intention of using them at present, of course; but it was well
to have a stock, for he might live to want them, and the
manufacture of them would help to while away the time.



CHAPTER 20
Irene's Clue


That same morning early, the princess woke in a terrible fright.
There was a hideous noise in her room - creatures snarling and
hissing and rocketing about as if they were fighting.  The moment
she came to herself, she remembered something she had never thought
of again - what her grandmother told her to do when she was
frightened.  She immediately took off her ring and put it under her
pillow.  As she did so she fancied she felt a finger and thumb take
it gently from under her palm.  'It must be my grandmother!' she
said to herself, and the thought gave her such courage that she
stopped to put on her dainty little slippers before running from
the room.  While doing this she caught sight of a long cloak of
sky-blue, thrown over the back of a chair by the bedside.  She had
never seen it before but it was evidently waiting for her.  She put
it on, and then, feeling with the forefinger of her right hand,
soon found her grandmother's thread, which she proceeded at once to
follow, expecting it would lead her straight up the old stair.
When she reached the door she found it went down and ran along the
floor, so that she had almost to crawl in order to keep a hold of
it.  Then, to her surprise, and somewhat to her dismay, she found
that instead of leading her towards the stair it turned in quite
the opposite direction.  It led her through certain narrow passages
towards the kitchen, turning aside ere she reached it, and guiding
her to a door which communicated with a small back yard.  Some of
the maids were already up, and this door was standing open.  Across
the yard the thread still ran along the ground, until it brought
her to a door in the wall which opened upon the Mountainside.  When
she had passed through, the thread rose to about half her height,
and she could hold it with ease as she walked.  It led her straight
up the mountain.

The cause of her alarm was less frightful than she supposed.  The
cook's great black cat, pursued by the housekeeper's terrier, had
bounced against her bedroom door, which had not been properly
fastened, and the two had burst into the room together and
commenced a battle royal.  How the nurse came to sleep through it
was a mystery, but I suspect the old lady had something to do with
it.

It was a clear warm morning.  The wind blew deliciously over the
Mountainside.  Here and there she saw a late primrose but she did
not stop to call upon them.  The sky was mottled with small clouds.

The sun was not yet up, but some of their fluffy edges had caught
his light, and hung out orange and gold-coloured fringes upon the
air.  The dew lay in round drops upon the leaves, and hung like
tiny diamond ear-rings from the blades of grass about her path.

'How lovely that bit of gossamer is!' thought the princess, looking
at a long undulating line that shone at some distance from her up
the hill.  It was not the time for gossamers though; and Irene soon
discovered that it was her own thread she saw shining on before her
in the light of the morning.  It was leading her she knew not
whither; but she had never in her life been out before sunrise, and
everything was so fresh and cool and lively and full of something
coming, that she felt too happy to be afraid of anything.

After leading her up a good distance, the thread turned to the
left, and down the path upon which she and Lootie had met Curdie.
But she never thought of that, for now in the morning light, with
its far outlook over the country, no path could have been more open
and airy and cheerful.  She could see the road almost to the
horizon, along which she had so often watched her king-papa and his
troop come shining, with the bugle- blast cleaving the air before
them; and it was like a companion to her.  Down and down the path
went, then up, and then down and then up again, getting rugged and
more rugged as it went; and still along the path went the silvery
thread, and still along the thread went Irene's little rosy-tipped
forefinger.  By and by she came to a little stream that jabbered
and prattled down the hill, and up the side of the stream went both
path and thread.  And still the path grew rougher and steeper, and
the mountain grew wilder, till Irene began to think she was going
a very long way from home; and when she turned to look back she saw
that the level country had vanished and the rough bare mountain had
closed in about her.  But still on went the thread, and on went the
princess.  Everything around her was getting brighter and brighter
as the sun came nearer; till at length his first rays all at once
alighted on the top of a rock before her, like some golden creature
fresh from the sky.  Then she saw that the little stream ran out of
a hole in that rock, that the path did not go past the rock, and
that the thread was leading her straight up to it.  A shudder ran
through her from head to foot when she found that the thread was
actually taking her into the hole out of which the stream ran.  It
ran out babbling joyously, but she had to go in.

She did not hesitate.  Right into the hole she went, which was high
enough to let her walk without stooping.  For a little way there
was a brown glimmer, but at the first turn it all but ceased, and
before she had gone many paces she was in total darkness.  Then she
began to be frightened indeed.  Every moment she kept feeling the
thread backwards and forwards, and as she went farther and farther
into the darkness of the great hollow mountain, she kept thinking
more and more about her grandmother, and all that she had said to
her, and how kind she had been, and how beautiful she was, and all
about her lovely room, and the fire of roses, and the great lamp
that sent its light through stone walls.  And she became more and
more sure that the thread could not have gone there of itself, and
that her grandmother must have sent it.  But it tried her
dreadfully when the path went down very steep, and especially When
she came to places where she had to go down rough stairs, and even
sometimes a ladder.  Through one narrow passage after another, over
lumps of rock and sand and clay, the thread guided her, until she
came to a small hole through which she had to creep.  Finding no
change on the other side, 'Shall I ever get back?' she thought,
over and over again, wondering at herself that she was not ten
times more frightened, and often feeling as if she were only
walking in the story of a dream.  Sometimes she heard the noise of
water, a dull gurgling inside the rock.  By and by she heard the
sounds of blows, which came nearer and nearer; but again they grew
duller, and almost died away.  In a hundred directions she turned,
obedient to the guiding thread.

At last she spied a dull red shine, and came up to the mica window,
and thence away and round about, and right, into a cavern, where
glowed the red embers of a fire.  Here the thread began to rise.
It rose as high as her head and higher still.  What should she do
if she lost her hold?  She was pulling it down: She might break it!
She could see it far up, glowing as red as her fire-opal in the
light of the embers.

But presently she came to a huge heap of stones, piled in a slope
against the wall of the cavern.  On these she climbed, and soon
recovered the level of the thread only however to find, the next
moment, that it vanished through the heap of stones, and left her
standing on it, with her face to the solid rock.  For one terrible
moment she felt as if her grandmother had forsaken her.  The thread
which the spiders had spun far over the seas, which her grandmother
had sat in the moonlight and spun again for her, which she had
tempered in the rose-fire and tied to her opal ring, had left her
- had gone where she could no longer follow it - had brought her
into a horrible cavern, and there left her!  She was forsaken
indeed!

'When shall I wake?' she said to herself in an agony, but the same
moment knew that it was no dream.  She threw herself upon the heap,
and began to cry.  It was well she did not know what creatures, one
of them with stone shoes on her feet, were lying in the next cave.
But neither did she know who was on the other side of the slab.

At length the thought struck her that at least she could follow the
thread backwards, and thus get out of the mountain, and home.  She
rose at once, and found the thread.  But the instant she tried to
feel it backwards, it vanished from her touch.  Forwards, it led
her hand up to the heap of stones - backwards it seemed nowhere.
Neither could she see it as before in the light of the fire.  She
burst into a wailing cry, and again threw herself down on the
stones.



CHAPTER 21
The Escape


As the princess lay and sobbed she kept feeling the thread
mechanically, following it with her finger many times up to the
stones in which it disappeared.  By and by she began, still
mechanically, to poke her finger in after it between the stones as
far as she could.  All at once it came into her head that she might
remove some of the stones and see where the thread went next.
Almost laughing at herself for never having thought of this before,
she jumped to her feet.  Her fear vanished; once more she was
certain her grandmother's thread could not have brought her there
just to leave her there; and she began to throw away the stones
from the top as fast as she could, sometimes two or three at a
handful, sometimes taking both hands to lift one.  After clearing
them away a little, she found that the thread turned and went
straight downwards.  Hence, as the heap sloped a good deal, growing
of course wider towards its base, she had to throw away a multitude
of stones to follow the thread.  But this was not all, for she soon
found that the thread, after going straight down for a little way,
turned first sideways in one direction, then sideways in another,
and then shot, at various angles, hither and thither inside the
heap, so that she began to be afraid that to clear the thread she
must remove the whole huge gathering.  She was dismayed at the very
idea, but, losing no time, set to work with a will; and with aching
back, and bleeding fingers and hands, she worked on, sustained by
the pleasure of seeing the heap slowly diminish and begin to show
itself on the opposite side of the fire.  Another thing which
helped to keep up her courage was that, as often as she uncovered
a turn of the thread, instead of lying loose upon the stone, it
tightened up; this made her sure that her grandmother was at the
end of it somewhere.

She had got about half-way down when she started, and nearly fell
with fright.  Close to her ears as it seemed, a voice broke out
singing:


'Jabber, bother, smash!
You'll have it all in a crash.
Jabber, smash, bother!
You'll have the worst of the pother.
Smash, bother, jabber! -'


Here Curdie stopped, either because he could not find a rhyme to
'jabber', or because he remembered what he had forgotten when he
woke up at the sound of Irene's labours, that his plan was to make
the goblins think he was getting weak.  But he had uttered enough
to let Irene know who he was.

'It's Curdie!' she cried joyfully.

'Hush! hush!' came Curdie's voice again from somewhere.  'Speak
softly.'

'Why, you were singing loud!' said Irene.

'Yes.  But they know I am here, and they don't know you are.  Who
are you?'

'I'm Irene,' answered the princess.  'I know who you are quite
well.  You're Curdie.'

'Why, how ever did you come here, Irene?'

'My great-great-grandmother sent me; and I think I've found out
why.  You can't get out, I suppose?'

'No, I can't.  What are you doing?'

'Clearing away a huge heap of stones.'

'There's a princess!' exclaimed Curdie, in a tone of delight, but
still speaking in little more than a whisper.  'I can't think how
you got here, though.'

'my grandmother sent me after her thread.'

'I don't know what you mean,' said Curdie; 'but so you're there, it
doesn't much matter.'

'Oh, yes, it does!' returned Irene.  'I should never have been here
but for her.'

'You can tell me all about it when we get out, then.  There's no
time to lose now,'said Curdie.

And Irene went to work, as fresh as when she began.

'There's such a lot of stones!' she said.  'It will take me a long
time to get them all away.'

'How far on have you got?' asked Curdie.

'I've got about the half away, but the other half is ever so much
bigger.'

'I don't think you will have to move the lower half.  Do you see a
slab laid up against the wall?'

Irene looked, and felt about with her hands, and soon perceived the
outlines of the slab.

'Yes,' she answered, 'I do.'

'Then, I think,' rejoined Curdie, 'when you have cleared the slab
about half-way down, or a bit more, I shall be able to push it
over.'

'I must follow my thread,' returned Irene, 'whatever I do.'

'What do you mean?'exclaimed Curdie.
'You will see when you get out,' answered the princess, and went on
harder than ever.

But she was soon satisfied that what Curdie wanted done and what
the thread wanted done were one and the same thing.  For she not
only saw that by following the turns of the thread she had been
clearing the face of the slab, but that, a little more than
half-way down, the thread went through the chink between the slab
and the wall into the place where Curdie was confined, so that she
could not follow it any farther until the slab was out of her way.
As soon as she found this, she said in a right joyous whisper:

'Now, Curdie, I think if you were to give a great push, the slab
would tumble over.'

'Stand quite clear of it, then,' said Curdie, 'and let me know when
you are ready.'

Irene got off the heap, and stood on one side of it.  'Now,
Curdie!' she cried.

Curdie gave a great rush with his shoulder against it.  Out tumbled
the slab on the heap, and out crept Curdie over the top of it.

'You've saved my life, Irene!' he whispered.

'Oh, Curdie! I'm so glad!  Let's get out of this horrid place as
fast as we can.'

'That's easier said than done,' returned he.

'Oh, no, it's quite easy,' said Irene.  'We have only to follow my
thread.  I am sure that it's going to take us out now.'

She had already begun to follow it over the fallen slab into the
hole, while Curdie was searching the floor of the cavern for his
pickaxe.

'Here it is!' he cried.  'No, it is not,' he added, in a
disappointed tone.  'What can it be, then?  I declare it's a torch.
That is jolly!  It's better almost than my pickaxe.  Much better if
it weren't for those stone shoes!' he went on, as he lighted the
torch by blowing the last embers of the expiring fire.

When he looked up, with the lighted torch casting a glare into the
great darkness of the huge cavern, he caught sight of Irene
disappearing in the hole out of which he had himself just come.

'Where are you going there?' he cried.  'That's not the way out.
That's where I couldn't get out.'

'I know that,' whispered Irene.  'But this is the way my thread
goes, and I must follow it.'

'What nonsense the child talks!' said Curdie to himself.  'I must
follow her, though, and see that she comes to no harm.  She will
soon find she can't get out that way, and then she will come with
me.'

So he crept over the slab once more into the hole with his torch in
his hand.  But when he looked about in it, he could see her
nowhere.  And now he discovered that although the hole was narrow,
it was much longer than he had supposed; for in one direction the
roof came down very low, and the hole went off in a narrow passage,
of which he could not see the end.  The princess must have crept in
there.  He got on his knees and one hand, holding the torch with
the other, and crept after her.  The hole twisted about, in some
parts so low that he could hardly get through, in others so high
that he could not see the roof, but everywhere it was narrow - far
too narrow for a goblin to get through, and so I presume they never
thought that Curdie might.  He was beginning to feel very
uncomfortable lest something should have befallen the princess,
when he heard her voice almost close to his ear, whispering:

'Aren't you coming, Curdie?'

And when he turned the next corner there she stood waiting for him.

'I knew you couldn't go wrong in that narrow hole, but now you must
keep by me, for here is a great wide place,' she said.

'I can't understand it,' said Curdie, half to himself, half to
Irene.

'Never mind,' she returned.  'Wait till we get out.'

Curdie, utterly astonished that she had already got so far, and by
a path he had known nothing of, thought it better to let her do as
she pleased.  'At all events,' he said again to himself, 'I know
nothing about the way, miner as I am; and she seems to think she
does know something about it, though how she should passes my
comprehension.  So she's just as likely to find her way as I am,
and as she insists on taking the lead, I must follow.  We can't be
much worse off than we are, anyhow.'  Reasoning thus, he followed
her a few steps, and came out in another great cavern, across which
Irene walked in a straight line, as confidently as if she knew
every step of the way.  Curdie went on after her, flashing his
torch about, and trying to see something of what lay around them.
Suddenly he started back a pace as the light fell upon something
close by which Irene was passing.  It was a platform of rock raised
a few feet from the floor and covered with sheepskins, upon which
lay two horrible figures asleep, at once recognized by Curdie as
the king and queen of the goblins.  He lowered his torch instantly
lest the light should awake them.  As he did so it flashed upon his
pickaxe, lying by the side of the queen, whose hand lay close by
the handle of it.

'Stop one moment,' he whispered.  'Hold my torch, and don't let the
light on their faces.'

Irene shuddered when she saw the frightful creatures, whom she had
passed without observing them, but she did as he requested, and
turning her back, held the torch low in front of her.  Curdie drew
his pickaxe carefully away, and as he did so spied one of her feet,
projecting from under the skins.  The great clumsy granite shoe,
exposed thus to his hand, was a temptation not to be resisted.  He
laid hold of it, and, with cautious efforts, drew it off.  The
moment he succeeded, he saw to his astonishment that what he had
sung in ignorance, to annoy the queen, was actually true: she had
six horrible toes.  Overjoyed at his success, and seeing by the
huge bump in the sheepskins where the other foot was, he proceeded
to lift them gently, for, if he could only succeed in carrying away
the other shoe as well, he would be no more afraid of the goblins
than of so many flies.  But as he pulled at the second shoe the
queen gave a growl and sat up in bed.  The same instant the king
awoke also and sat up beside her.

'Run, Irene!' cried Curdie, for though he was not now in the least
afraid for himself, he was for the princess.

Irene looked once round, saw the fearful creatures awake, and like
the wise princess she was, dashed the torch on the ground and
extinguished it, crying out:

'Here, Curdie, take my hand.'

He darted to her side, forgetting neither the queen's shoe nor his
pickaxe, and caught hold of her hand, as she sped fearlessly where
her thread guided her.  They heard the queen give a great bellow;
but they had a good start, for it would be some time before they
could get torches lighted to pursue them.  just as they thought
they saw a gleam behind them, the thread brought them to a very
narrow opening, through which Irene crept easily, and Curdie with
difficulty.

'Now,'said Curdie; 'I think we shall be safe.'

'Of course we shall,' returned Irene.  'Why do you think so?'asked
Curdie.

'Because my grandmother is taking care of us.'

'That's all nonsense,' said Curdie.  'I don't know what you mean.'

'Then if you don't know what I mean, what right have you to call it
nonsense?' asked the princess, a little offended.

'I beg your pardon, Irene,' said Curdie; 'I did not mean to vex
you.'

'Of course not,' returned the princess.  'But why do you think we
shall be safe?'
'Because the king and queen are far too stout to get through that
hole.'

'There might be ways round,' said the princess.

'To be sure there might: we are not out of it yet,' acknowledged
Curdie.

'But what do you mean by the king and queen?' asked the princess.
'I should never call such creatures as those a king and a queen.'

'Their own people do, though,' answered Curdie.

The princess asked more questions, and Curdie, as they walked
leisurely along, gave her a full account, not only of the character
and habits of the goblins, so far as he knew them, but of his own
adventures with them, beginning from the very night after that in
which he had met her and Lootie upon the mountain.  When he had
finished, he begged Irene to tell him how it was that she had come
to his rescue.  So Irene too had to tell a long story, which she
did in rather a roundabout manner, interrupted by many questions
concerning things she had not explained.  But her tale, as he did
not believe more than half of it, left everything as unaccountable
to him as before, and he was nearly as much perplexed as to what he
must think of the princess.  He could not believe that she was
deliberately telling stories, and the only conclusion he could come
to was that Lootie had been playing the child tricks, inventing no
end of lies to frighten her for her own purposes.

'But how ever did Lootie come to let you go into the mountains
alone?'he asked.

'Lootie knows nothing about it.  I left her fast asleep - at least
I think so.  I hope my grandmother won't let her get into trouble,
for it wasn't her fault at all, as my grandmother very well knows.'

'But how did you find your way to me?' persisted Curdie.

'I told you already,' answered Irene; 'by keeping my finger upon my
grandmother's thread, as I am doing now.'

'You don't mean you've got the thread there?'

'Of course I do.  I have told you so ten times already.  I have
hardly - except when I was removing the stones - taken my finger
off it.  There!' she added, guiding Curdie's hand to the thread,
'you feel it yourself - don't you?'

'I feel nothing at all,' replied Curdie.
'Then what can be the matter with your finger?  I feel it
perfectly.  To be sure it is very thin, and in the sunlight looks
just like the thread of a spider, though there are many of them
twisted together to make it - but for all that I can't think why
you shouldn't feel it as well as I do.'

Curdie was too polite to say he did not believe there was any
thread there at all.  What he did say was:

'Well, I can make nothing of it.'

'I can, though, and you must be glad of that, for it will do for
both of us.'

'We're not out yet,' said Curdie.

'We soon shall be,' returned Irene confidently.  And now the thread
went downwards, and led Irene's hand to a hole in the floor of the
cavern, whence came a sound of running water which they had been
hearing for some time.

'It goes into the ground now, Curdie,' she said, stopping.

He had been listening to another sound, which his practised ear had
caught long ago, and which also had been growing louder.  It was
the noise the goblin-miners made at their work, and they seemed to
be at no great distance now.  Irene heard it the moment she
stopped.

'What is that noise?' she asked.  'Do you know, Curdie?'

'Yes.  It is the goblins digging and burrowing,' he answered.

'And you don't know what they do it for?'

'No; I haven't the least idea.  Would you like to see them?' he
asked, wishing to have another try after their secret.

'If my thread took me there, I shouldn't much mind; but I don't
want to see them, and I can't leave my thread.  It leads me down
into the hole, and we had better go at once.'

'Very well.  Shall I go in first?' said Curdie.

'No; better not.  You can't feel the thread,' she answered,
stepping down through a narrow break in the floor of the cavern.
'Oh!' she cried, 'I am in the water.  It is running strong - but it
is not deep, and there is just room to walk.  Make haste, Curdie.'

He tried, but the hole was too small for him to get in.

'Go on a little bit he said, shouldering his pickaxe.  In a few
moments he had cleared a larger opening and followed her.  They
went on, down and down with the running water, Curdie getting more
and more afraid it was leading them to some terrible gulf in the
heart of the mountain.  In one or two places he had to break away
the rock to make room before even Irene could get through - at
least without hurting herself.  But at length they spied a glimmer
of light, and in a minute more they were almost blinded by the full
sunlight, into which they emerged.  It was some little time before
the princess could see well enough to discover that they stood in
her own garden, close by the seat on which she and her king-papa
had sat that afternoon.  They had come out by the channel of the
little stream.  She danced and clapped her hands with delight.

'Now, Curdie!' she cried, 'won't you believe what I told you about
my grandmother and her thread?'

For she had felt all the time that Curdie was not believing what
she told him.

'There! - don't you see it shining on before us?' she added.

'I don't see anything,' persisted Curdie.

'Then you must believe without seeing,' said the princess; 'for you
can't deny it has brought us out of the mountain.'

'I can't deny we are out of the mountain, and I should be very
ungrateful indeed to deny that you had brought me out of it.'

'I couldn't have done it but for the thread,' persisted Irene.

'That's the part I don't understand.'

'well, come along, and Lootie will get you something to eat.  I am
sure you must want it very much.'

'Indeed I do.  But my father and mother will be so anxious about
me, I must make haste - first up the mountain to tell my mother,
and then down into the mine again to let my father know.'

'Very well, Curdie; but you can't get out without coming this way,
and I will take you through the house, for that is nearest.'

They met no one by the way, for, indeed, as before, the people were
here and there and everywhere searching for the princess.  When
they got in Irene found that the thread, as she had half expected,
went up the old staircase, and a new thought struck her.  She
turned to Curdie and said:

'My grandmother wants me.  Do come up with me and see her.  Then
you will know that I have been telling you the truth.  Do come - to
please me, Curdie.  I can't bear you should think what I say is not
true.'

'I never doubted you believed what you said,' returned Curdie.  'I
only thought you had some fancy in your head that was not correct.'
'But do come, dear Curdie.'

The little miner could not withstand this appeal, and though he
felt shy in what seemed to him a huge grand house, he yielded, and
followed her up the stair.



CHAPTER 22
The Old Lady and Curdie


Up the stair then they went, and the next and the next, and through
the long rows of empty rooms, and up the little tower stair, Irene
growing happier and happier as she ascended.  There was no answer
when she knocked at length at the door of the workroom, nor could
she hear any sound of the spinning-wheel, and once more her heart
sank within her, but only for one moment, as she turned and knocked
at the other door.

'Come in,' answered the sweet voice of her grandmother, and Irene
opened the door and entered, followed by Curdie.

'You darling!' cried the lady, who was seated by a fire of red
roses mingled with white.  'I've been waiting for you, and indeed
getting a little anxious about you, and beginning to think whether
I had not better go and fetch you myself.'

As she spoke she took the little princess in her arms and placed
her upon her lap.  She was dressed in white now, and looking if
possible more lovely than ever.

'I've brought Curdie, grandmother.  He wouldn't believe what I told
him and so I've brought him.'

'Yes - I see him.  He is a good boy, Curdie, and a brave boy.
Aren't you glad you've got him out?'

'Yes, grandmother.  But it wasn't very good of him not to believe
me when I was telling him the truth.'

'People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must
not be hard upon those who believe less.  I doubt if you would have
believed it all yourself if you hadn't seen some of it.'

'Ah! yes, grandmother, I dare say.  I'm sure you are right.  But
he'll believe now.'

'I don't know that,' replied her grandmother.

'Won't you, Curdie?' said Irene, looking round at him as she asked
the question.  He was standing in the middle of the floor, staring,
and looking strangely bewildered.  This she thought came of his
astonishment at the beauty of the lady.
'Make a bow to my grandmother, Curdie,' she said.

'I don't see any grandmother,' answered Curdie rather gruffly.

'Don't see my grandmother, when I'm sitting in her lap?' exclaimed
the princess.

'No, I don't,' reiterated Curdie, in an offended tone.

'Don't you see the lovely fire of roses - white ones amongst them
this time?' asked Irene, almost as bewildered as he.

'No, I don't,' answered Curdie, almost sulkily.

'Nor the blue bed?  Nor the rose-coloured counterpane? - Nor the
beautiful light, like the moon, hanging from the roof?'

'You're making game of me, Your Royal Highness; and after what we
have come through together this day, I don't think it is kind of
you,' said Curdie, feeling very much hurt.

'Then what do you see?' asked Irene, who perceived at once that for
her not to believe him was at least as bad as for him not to
believe her.

'I see a big, bare, garret-room - like the one in mother's cottage,
only big enough to take the cottage itself in, and leave a good
margin all round,' answered Curdie.

'And what more do you see?'

'I see a tub, and a heap of musty straw, and a withered apple, and
a ray of sunlight coming through a hole in the middle of the roof
and shining on your head, and making all the place look a curious
dusky brown.  I think you had better drop it, princess, and go down
to the nursery, like a good girl.'

'But don't you hear my grandmother talking to me?' asked Irene,
almost crying.

'No.  I hear the cooing of a lot of pigeons.  If you won't come
down, I will go without you.  I think that will be better anyhow,
for I'm sure nobody who met us would believe a word we said to
them.  They would think we made it all up.  I don't expect anybody
but my own father and mother to believe me.  They know I wouldn't
tell a story.'

'And yet you won't believe me, Curdie?' expostulated the princess,
now fairly crying with vexation and sorrow at the gulf between her
and Curdie.

'No.  I can't, and I can't help it,' said Curdie, turning to leave
the room.

'What SHALL I do, grandmother?' sobbed the princess, turning her
face round upon the lady's bosom, and shaking with suppressed sobs.

'You must give him time,' said her grandmother; 'and you must be
content not to be believed for a while.  It is very hard to bear;
but I have had to bear it, and shall have to bear it many a time
yet.  I will take care of what Curdie thinks of you in the end.
You must let him go now.'

'You're not coming, are you?' asked Curdie.

'No, Curdie; my grandmother says I must let you go.  Turn to the
right when you get to the bottom of all the stairs, and that will
take you to the hall where the great door is.'

'Oh! I don't doubt I can find my way - without you, princess, or
your old grannie's thread either,' said Curdie quite rudely.

'Oh, Curdie! Curdie!'

'I wish I had gone home at once.  I'm very much obliged to you,
Irene, for getting me out of that hole, but I wish you hadn't made
a fool of me afterwards.'

He said this as he opened the door, which he left open, and,
without another word, went down the stair.  Irene listened with
dismay to his departing footsteps.  Then turning again to the lady:

'What does it all mean, grandmother?' she sobbed, and burst into
fresh tears.

'It means, my love, that I did not mean to show myself.  Curdie is
not yet able to believe some things.  Seeing is not believing - it
is only seeing.  You remember I told you that if Lootie were to see
me, she would rub her eyes, forget the half she saw, and call the
other half nonsense.'

'Yes; but I should have thought Curdie -'

'You are right.  Curdie is much farther on than Lootie, and you
will see what will come of it.  But in the meantime you must be
content, I say, to be misunderstood for a while.  We are all very
anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be.  But there
is one thing much more necessary.'

'What is that, grandmother?'

'To understand other people.'

'Yes, grandmother.  I must be fair - for if I'm not fair to other
people, I'm not worth being understood myself.  I see.  So as
Curdie can't help it, I will not be vexed with him, but just wait.'

'There's my own dear child,' said her grandmother, and pressed her
close to her bosom.

'Why weren't you in your workroom when we came up, grandmother?'
asked Irene, after a few moments' silence.

'If I had been there, Curdie would have seen me well enough.  But
why should I be there rather than in this beautiful room?'

'I thought you would be spinning.'

'I've nobody to spin for just at present.  I never spin without
knowing for whom I am spinning.'

'That reminds me - there is one thing that puzzles me,' said the
princess: 'how are you to get the thread out of the mountain again?
Surely you won't have to make another for me?  That would be such
a trouble!'

The lady set her down and rose and went to the fire.  Putting in
her hand, she drew it out again and held up the shining ball
between her finger and thumb.

'I've got it now, you see,' she said, coming back to the princess,
'all ready for you when you want it.'

Going to her cabinet, she laid it in the same drawer as before.

'And here is your ring,' she added, taking it from the little
finger of her left hand and putting it on the forefinger of Irene's
right hand.

'Oh, thank you, grandmother! I feel so safe now!'

'You are very tired, my child,' the lady went on.  'Your hands are
hurt with the stones, and I have counted nine bruises on you.  just
look what you are like.'

And she held up to her a little mirror which she had brought from
the cabinet.  The princess burst into a merry laugh at the sight.
She was so draggled with the stream and dirty with creeping through
narrow places, that if she had seen the reflection without knowing
it was a reflection, she would have taken herself for some gipsy
child whose face was washed and hair combed about once in a month.
The lady laughed too, and lifting her again upon her knee, took off
her cloak and night-gown.  Then she carried her to the side of the
room.  Irene wondered what she was going to do with her, but asked
no questions - only starting a little when she found that she was
going to lay her in the large silver bath; for as she looked into
it, again she saw no bottom, but the stars shining miles away, as
it seemed, in a great blue gulf.  Her hands closed involuntarily on
the beautiful arms that held her, and that was all.

The lady pressed her once more to her bosom, saying:

'Do not be afraid, my child.'

'No, grandmother,' answered the princess, with a little gasp; and
the next instant she sank in the clear cool water.

When she opened her eyes, she saw nothing but a strange lovely blue
over and beneath and all about her.  The lady, and the beautiful
room, had vanished from her sight, and she seemed utterly alone.
But instead of being afraid, she felt more than happy - perfectly
blissful.  And from somewhere came the voice of the lady, singing
a strange sweet song, of which she could distinguish every word;
but of the sense she had only a feeling - no understanding.  Nor
could she remember a single line after it was gone.  It vanished,
like the poetry in a dream, as fast as it came.  In after years,
however, she would sometimes fancy that snatches of melody suddenly
rising in her brain must be little phrases and fragments of the air
of that song; and the very fancy would make her happier, and abler
to do her duty.

How long she lay in the water she did not know.  It seemed a long
time - not from weariness but from pleasure.  But at last she felt
the beautiful hands lay hold of her, and through the gurgling water
she was lifted out into the lovely room.  The lady carried her to
the fire, and sat down with her in her lap, and dried her tenderly
with the softest towel.  It was so different from Lootie's drying.
When the lady had done, she stooped to the fire, and drew from it
her night-gown, as white as snow.

'How delicious!' exclaimed the princess.  'It smells of all the
roses in the world, I think.'

When she stood up on the floor she felt as if she had been made
over again.  Every bruise and all weariness were gone, and her
hands were soft and whole as ever.

'Now I am going to put you to bed for a good sleep,' said her
grandmother.

'But what will Lootie be thinking?  And what am I to say to her
when she asks me where I have been?'

'Don't trouble yourself about it.  You will find it all come
right,' said her grandmother, and laid her into the blue bed, under
the rosy counterpane.

'There is just one thing more,' said Irene.  'I am a little anxious
about Curdie.  As I brought him into the house, I ought to have
seen him safe on his way home.'

'I took care of all that,' answered the lady.  'I told you to let
him go, and therefore I was bound to look after him.  Nobody saw
him, and he is now eating a good dinner in his mother's cottage far
up in the mountain.'

'Then I will go to sleep,' said Irene, and in a few minutes she was
fast asleep.



CHAPTER 23
Curdie and His Mother


Curdie went up the mountain neither whistling nor singing, for he
was vexed with Irene for taking him in, as he called it; and he was
vexed with himself for having spoken to her so angrily.  His mother
gave a cry of joy when she saw him, and at once set about getting
him something to eat, asking him questions all the time, which he
did not answer so cheerfully as usual.  When his meal was ready,
she left him to eat it, and hurried to the mine to let his father
know he was safe.  When she came back, she found him fast asleep
upon her bed; nor did he wake until his father came home in the
evening.

'Now, Curdie,' his mother said, as they sat at supper, 'tell us the
whole story from beginning to end, just as it all happened.'

Curdie obeyed, and told everything to the point where they came out
upon the lawn in the garden of the king's house.

'And what happened after that?' asked his mother.  'You haven't
told us all.  You ought to be very happy at having got away from
those demons, and instead of that I never saw you so gloomy.  There
must be something more.  Besides, you do not speak of that lovely
child as I should like to hear you.  She saved your life at the
risk of her own, and yet somehow you don't seem to think much of
it.'

'She talked such nonsense' answered Curdie, 'and told me a pack of
things that weren't a bit true; and I can't get over it.'

'What were they?' asked his father.  'Your mother may be able to
throw some light upon them.'

Then Curdie made a clean breast of it, and told them everything.

They all sat silent for some time, pondering the strange tale.  At
last Curdie's mother spoke.

'You confess, my boy,' she said, 'there is something about the
whole affair you do not understand?'

'Yes, of course, mother,' he answered.  'I cannot understand how a
child knowing nothing about the mountain, or even that I was shut
up in it, should come all that way alone, straight to where I was;
and then, after getting me out of the hole, lead me out of the
mountain too, where I should not have known a step of the way if it
had been as light as in the open air.'
'Then you have no right to say what she told you was not true.  She
did take you out, and she must have had something to guide her: why
not a thread as well as a rope, or anything else?  There is
something you cannot explain, and her explanation may be the right
one.'

'It's no explanation at all, mother; and I can't believe it.'

'That may be only because you do not understand it.  If you did,
you would probably find it was an explanation, and believe it
thoroughly.  I don't blame you for not being able to believe it,
but I do blame you for fancying such a child would try to deceive
you.  Why should she?  Depend upon it, she told you all she knew.
Until you had found a better way of accounting for it all, you
might at least have been more sparing of your judgement.'

'That is what something inside me has been saying all the time,'
said Curdie, hanging down his head.  'But what do you make of the
grandmother?  That is what I can't get over.  To take me up to an
old garret, and try to persuade me against the sight of my own eyes
that it was a beautiful room, with blue walls and silver stars, and
no end of things in it, when there was nothing there but an old tub
and a withered apple and a heap of straw and a sunbeam!  It was too
bad!  She might have had some old woman there at least to pass for
her precious grandmother!'

'Didn't she speak as if she saw those other things herself,
Curdie?'

'Yes.  That's what bothers me.  You would have thought she really
meant and believed that she saw every one of the things she talked
about.  And not one of them there!  It was too bad, I say.'

'Perhaps some people can see things other people can't see,
Curdie,' said his mother very gravely.  'I think I will tell you
something I saw myself once - only Perhaps You won't believe me
either!'

'Oh, mother, mother!' cried Curdie, bursting into tears; 'I don't
deserve that, surely!'

'But what I am going to tell you is very strange,' persisted his
mother; 'and if having heard it you were to say I must have been
dreaming, I don't know that I should have any right to be vexed
with you, though I know at least that I was not asleep.'

'Do tell me, mother.  Perhaps it will help me to think better of
the princess.'

'That's why I am tempted to tell you,' replied his mother.  'But
first, I may as well mention that, according to old whispers, there
is something more than common about the king's family; and the
queen was of the same blood, for they were cousins of some degree.
There were strange stories told concerning them - all good stories
- but strange, very strange.  What they were I cannot tell, for I
only remember the faces of my grandmother and my mother as they
talked together about them.  There was wonder and awe - not fear -
in their eyes, and they whispered, and never spoke aloud.  But what
I saw myself was this: Your father was going to work in the mine
one night, and I had been down with his supper.  It was soon after
we were married, and not very long before you were born.  He came
with me to the mouth of the mine, and left me to go home alone, for
I knew the way almost as well as the floor of our own cottage.  It
was pretty dark, and in some parts of the road where the rocks
overhung nearly quite dark.  But I got along perfectly well, never
thinking of being afraid, until I reached a spot you know well
enough, Curdie, where the path has to make a sharp turn out of the
way of a great rock on the left-hand side.  When I got there, I was
suddenly surrounded by about half a dozen of the cobs, the first I
had ever seen, although I had heard tell of them often enough.  One
of them blocked up the path, and they all began tormenting and
teasing me in a way it makes me shudder to think of even now.'

'If I had only been with you!' cried father and son in a breath.

The mother gave a funny little smile, and went on.

'They had some of their horrible creatures with them too, and I
must confess I was dreadfully frightened.  They had torn my clothes
very much, and I was afraid they were going to tear myself to
pieces, when suddenly a great white soft light shone upon me.  I
looked up.  A broad ray, like a shining road, came down from a
large globe of silvery light, not very high up, indeed not quite so
high as the horizon - so it could not have been a new star or
another moon or anything of that sort.  The cobs dropped
persecuting me, and looked dazed, and I thought they were going to
run away, but presently they began again.  The same moment,
however, down the path from the globe of light came a bird, shining
like silver in the sun.  It gave a few rapid flaps first, and then,
with its wings straight out, shot,sliding down the slope of the
light.  It looked to me just like a white pigeon.  But whatever it
was, when the cobs caught sight of it coming straight down upon
them, they took to their heels and scampered away across the
mountain, leaving me safe, only much frightened.  As soon as it had
sent them off, the bird went gliding again up the light, and the
moment it reached the globe the light disappeared, just as if a
shutter had been closed over a window, and I saw it no More.  But
I had no more trouble with the cobs that night or ever after.'

'How strange!' exclaimed Curdie.

'Yes, it was strange; but I can't help believing it, whether you do
or not,' said his mother.

'It's exactly as your mother told it to me the very next morning,'
said his father.

'You don't think I'm doubting my own mother?' cried Curdie.
'There are other people in the world quite as well worth believing
as your own mother,' said his mother.  'I don't know that she's so
much the fitter to be believed that she happens to be your mother,
Mr. Curdie.  There are mothers far more likely to tell lies than
the little girl I saw talking to the primroses a few weeks ago.  If
she were to lie I should begin to doubt my own word.'

'But princesses have told lies as well as other people,' said
Curdie.

'Yes, but not princesses like that child.  She's a good girl, I am
certain, and that's more than being a princess.  Depend upon it you
will have to be sorry for behaving so to her, Curdie.  You ought at
least to have held your tongue.'

'I am sorry now,' answered Curdie.

'You ought to go and tell her so, then.'

'I don't see how I could manage that.  They wouldn't let a miner
boy like me have a word with her alone; and I couldn't tell her
before that nurse of hers.  She'd be asking ever so many questions,
and I don't know how many the little princess would like me to
answer.  She told me that Lootie didn't know anything about her
coming to get me out of the mountain.  I am certain she would have
prevented her somehow if she had known it.  But I may have a chance
before long, and meantime I must try to do something for her.  I
think, father, I have got on the track at last.'

'Have you, indeed, my boy?' said Peter.  'I am sure you deserve
some success; you have worked very hard for it.  What have you
found out?'

'It's difficult, you know, father, inside the mountain, especially
in the dark, and not knowing what turns you have taken, to tell the
lie of things outside.'

'Impossible, my boy, without a chart, or at least a compass,'
returned his father.

'Well, I think I have nearly discovered in what direction the cobs
are mining.  If I am right, I know something else that I can put to
it, and then one and one will make three.'

'They very often do, Curdie, as we miners ought to be very well
aware.  Now tell us, my boy, what the two things are, and see
whether we can guess at the same third as you.'

'I don't see what that has to do with the princess,' interposed his
mother.

'I will soon let you see that, mother.  Perhaps you may think me
foolish, but until I am sure there, is nothing in my present fancy,
I am more determined than ever to go on with my observations.  just
as we came to the channel by which we got out, I heard the miners
at work somewhere near - I think down below us.  Now since I began
to watch them, they have mined a good half-mile, in a straight
line; and so far as I am aware, they are working in no other part
of the mountain.  But I never could tell in what direction they
were going.  When we came out in the king's garden, however, I
thought at once whether it was possible they were working towards
the king's house; and what I want to do tonight is to make sure
whether they are or not.  I will take a light with me -'

'Oh, Curdie,' cried his mother, 'then they will see you.'

'I'm no more afraid of them now than I was before,' rejoined
Curdie, 'now that I've got this precious shoe.  They can't make
another such in a hurry, and one bare foot will do for my purpose.
Woman as she may be, I won't spare her next time.  But I shall be
careful with my light, for I don't want them to see me.  I won't
stick it in my hat.'

'Go on, then, and tell us what you mean to do.'

'I mean to take a bit of paper with me and a pencil, and go in at
the mouth of the stream by which we came out.  I shall mark on the
paper as near as I can the angle of every turning I take until I
find the cobs at work, and so get a good idea in what direction
they are going.  If it should prove to be nearly parallel with the
stream, I shall know it is towards the king's house they are
working.'

'And what if you should?  How much wiser will you be then?'

'Wait a minute, mother dear.  I told you that when I came upon the
royal family in the cave, they were talking of their prince -
Harelip, they called him - marrying a sun-woman - that means one of
us - one with toes to her feet.  Now in the speech one of them made
that night at their great gathering, of which I heard only a part,
he said that peace would be secured for a generation at least by
the pledge the prince would hold for the good behaviour of her
relatives: that's what he said, and he must have meant the
sun-woman the prince was to marry.  I am quite sure the king is
much too proud to wish his son to marry any but a princess, and
much too knowing to fancy that his having a peasant woman for a
wife would be of any great advantage to them.'

'I see what you are driving at now,' said his mother.

'But,' said his father, 'our king would dig the mountain to the
plain before he would have his princess the wife of a cob, if he
were ten times a prince.'

'Yes; but they think so much of themselves!' said his mother.
'Small creatures always do.  The bantam is the proudest cock in my
little yard.'

'And I fancy,' said Curdie, 'if they once got her, they would tell
the king they would kill her except he consented to the marriage.'

'They might say so,' said his father, 'but they wouldn't kill her;
they would keep her alive for the sake of the hold it gave them
over our king.  Whatever he did to them, they would threaten to do
the same to the princess.'

'And they are bad enough to torment her just for their own
amusement - I know that,' said his mother.

'Anyhow, I will keep a watch on them, and see what they are up to,'
said Curdie.  'It's too horrible to think of.  I daren't let myself
do it.  But they shan't have her - at least if I can help it.  So,
mother dear - my clue is all right - will you get me a bit of paper
and a pencil and a lump of pease pudding, and I will set out at
once.  I saw a place where I can climb over the wall of the garden
quite easily.'

'You must mind and keep out of the way of the men on the watch,'
said his mother.

'That I will.  I don't want them to know anything about it.  They
would spoil it all.  The cobs would only try some other plan - they
are such obstinate creatures!  I shall take good care, mother.
They won't kill and eat me either, if they should come upon me.  So
you needn't mind them.'

His mother got him what he had asked for, and Curdie set out.
Close beside the door by which the princess left the garden for the
mountain stood a great rock, and by climbing it Curdie got over the
wall.  He tied his clue to a stone just inside the channel of the
stream, and took his pickaxe with him.  He had not gone far before
he encountered a horrid creature coming towards the mouth.  The
spot was too narrow for two of almost any size or shape, and
besides Curdie had no wish to let the creature pass.  Not being
able to use his pickaxe, however, he had a severe struggle with
him, and it was only after receiving many bites, some of them bad,
that he succeeded in killing him with his pocket-knife.  Having
dragged him out, he made haste to get in again before another
should stop up the way.

I need not follow him farther in this night's adventures.  He
returned to his breakfast, satisfied that the goblins were mining
in the direction of the palace - on so low a level that their
intention must, he thought, be to burrow under the walls of the
king's house, and rise up inside it - in order, he fully believed,
to lay hands on the little princess, and carry her off for a wife
to their horrid Harelip.



CHAPTER 24
Irene Behaves Like a Princess

When the princess awoke from the sweetest of sleeps, she found her
nurse bending over her, the housekeeper looking over the nurse's
shoulder, and the laundry- maid looking over the housekeeper's.
The room was full of women-servants; and the gentlemen-at-arms,
with a long column of servants behind them, were peeping, or trying
to peep in at the door of the nursery.

'Are those horrid creatures gone?' asked the princess, remembering
first what had terrified her in the morning.

'You naughty, naughty little princess!' cried Lootie.

Her face was very pale, with red streaks in it, and she looked as
if she were going to shake her; but Irene said nothing - only
waited to hear what should come next.

'How could you get under the clothes like that, and make us all
fancy you were lost!  And keep it up all day too!  You are the most
obstinate child!  It's anything but fun to us, I can tell you!'

It was the only way the nurse could account for her disappearance.

'I didn't do that, Lootie,' said Irene, very quietly.

'Don't tell stories!' cried her nurse quite rudely.

'I shall tell you nothing at all,' said Irene.

'That's just as bad,' said the nurse.

'Just as bad to say nothing at all as to tell stories?' exclaimed
the princess.  'I will ask my papa about that.  He won't say so.
And I don't think he will like you to say so.'

'Tell me directly what you mean by it!' screamed the nurse, half
wild with anger at the princess and fright at the possible
consequences to herself.

'When I tell you the truth, Lootie,' said the princess, who somehow
did not feel at all angry, 'you say to me "Don't tell stories": it
seems I must tell stories before you will believe me.'

'You are very rude, princess,' said the nurse.

'You are so rude, Lootie, that I will not speak to you again till
you are sorry.  Why should I, when I know you will not believe me?'
returned the princess.  For she did know perfectly well that if she
were to tell Lootie what she had been about, the more she went on
to tell her, the less would she believe her.

'You are the most provoking child!' cried her nurse.  'You deserve
to be well punished for your wicked behaviour.'

'Please, Mrs Housekeeper,' said the princess, 'will you take me to
your room, and keep me till my king-papa comes?  I will ask him to
come as soon as he can.'

Every one stared at these words.  Up to this moment they had all
regarded her as little more than a baby.

But the housekeeper was afraid of the nurse, and sought to patch
matters up, saying:

'I am sure, princess, nursie did not mean to be rude to you.'

'I do not think my papa would wish me to have a nurse who spoke to
me as Lootie does.  If she thinks I tell lies, she had better
either say so to my papa, or go away.  Sir Walter, will you take
charge of me?'

'With the greatest of pleasure, princess,' answered the captain of
the gentlemen-at-arms, walking with his great stride into the room.

The crowd of servants made eager way for him, and he bowed low
before the little princess's bed.  'I shall send my servant at
once, on the fastest horse in the stable, to tell your king-papa
that Your Royal Highness desires his presence.  When you have
chosen one of these under-servants to wait upon you, I shall order
the room to be cleared.'

'Thank you very much, Sir Walter,' said the princess, and her eye
glanced towards a rosy-cheeked girl who had lately come to the
house as a scullery-maid.

But when Lootie saw the eyes of her dear princess going in search
of another instead of her, she fell upon her knees by the bedside,
and burst into a great cry of distress.

'I think, Sir Walter,' said the princess, 'I will keep Lootie.  But
I put myself under your care; and you need not trouble my king-papa
until I speak to you again.  Will you all please to go away?  I am
quite safe and well, and I did not hide myself for the sake either
of amusing myself, or of troubling my people.  Lootie, will you
please to dress me.'



CHAPTER 25
Curdie Comes to Grief


Everything was for some time quiet above ground.  The king was
still away in a distant part of his dominions.  The men-at-arms
kept watching about the house.  They had been considerably
astonished by finding at the foot of the rock in the garden the
hideous body of the goblin creature killed by Curdie; but they came
to the conclusion that it had been slain in the mines, and had
crept out there to die; and except an occasional glimpse of a live
one they saw nothing to cause alarm.  Curdie kept watching in the
mountain, and the goblins kept burrowing deeper into the earth.  As
long as they went deeper there was, Curdie judged, no immediate
danger.

To Irene the summer was as full of pleasure as ever, and for a long
time, although she often thought of her grandmother during the day,
and often dreamed about her at night, she did not see her.  The
kids and the flowers were as much her delight as ever, and she made
as much friendship with the miners' children she met on the
mountain as Lootie would permit; but Lootie had very foolish
notions concerning the dignity of a princess, not understanding
that the truest princess is just the one who loves all her brothers
and sisters best, and who is most able to do them good by being
humble towards them.  At the same time she was considerably altered
for the better in her behaviour to the princess.  She could not
help seeing that she was no longer a mere child, but wiser than her
age would account for.  She kept foolishly whispering to the
servants, however - sometimes that the princess was not right in
her mind, sometimes that she was too good to live, and other
nonsense of the same sort.

All this time Curdie had to be sorry, without a chance of
confessing, that he had behaved so unkindly to the princess.  This
perhaps made him the more diligent in his endeavours to serve her.
His mother and he often talked on the subject, and she comforted
him, and told him she was sure he would some day have the
opportunity he so much desired.
Here I should like to remark, for the sake of princes and
princesses in general, that it is a low and contemptible thing to
refuse to confess a fault, or even an error.  If a true princess
has done wrong, she is always uneasy until she has had an
opportunity of throwing the wrongness away from her by saying: 'I
did it; and I wish I had not; and I am sorry for having done it.'
So you see there is some ground for supposing that Curdie was not
a miner only, but a prince as well.  Many such instances have been
known in the world's history.

At length, however, he began to see signs of a change in the
proceedings of the goblin excavators: they were going no deeper,
but had commenced running on a level; and he watched them,
therefore, more closely than ever.  All at once, one night, coming
to a slope of very hard rock, they began to ascend along the
inclined plane of its surface.  Having reached its top, they went
again on a level for a night or two, after which they began to
ascend once more, and kept on at a pretty steep angle.  At length
Curdie judged it time to transfer his observation to another
quarter, and the next night he did not go to the mine at all; but,
leaving his pickaxe and clue at home, and taking only his usual
lumps of bread and pease pudding, went down the mountain to the
king's house.  He climbed over the wall, and remained in the garden
the whole night, creeping on hands and knees from one spot to the
other, and lying at full length with his ear to the ground,
listening.  But he heard nothing except the tread of the
men-at-arms as they marched about, whose observation, as the night
was cloudy and there was no moon, he had little difficulty in
avoiding.  For several following nights he continued to haunt the
garden and listen, but with no success.

At length, early one evening, whether it was that he had got
careless of his own safety, or that the growing moon had become
strong enough to expose him, his watching came to a sudden end.  He
was creeping from behind the rock where the stream ran out, for he
had been listening all round it in the hope it might convey to his
ear some indication of the whereabouts of the goblin miners, when
just as he came into the moonlight on the lawn, a whizz in his ear
and a blow upon his leg startled him.  He instantly squatted in the
hope of eluding further notice.  But when he heard the sound of
running feet, he jumped up to take the chance of escape by flight.
He fell, however, with a keen shoot of pain, for the bolt of a
crossbow had wounded his leg, and the blood was now streaming from
it.  He was instantly laid Hold of by two or three of the
men-at-arms.  It was useless to struggle, and he submitted in
silence.

'It's a boy!' cried several of them together, in a tone of
amazement.  'I thought it was one of those demons.  What are you
about here?'

'Going to have a little rough usage, apparently,' said Curdie,
laughing, as the men shook him.

'Impertinence will do you no good.  You have no business here in
the king's grounds, and if you don't give a true account of
yourself, you shall fare as a thief.'

'Why, what else could he be?' said one.

'He might have been after a lost kid, you know,' suggested another.

'I see no good in trying to excuse him.  He has no business here,
anyhow.'

'Let me go away, then, if you please,' said Curdie.

'But we don't please - not except you give a good account of
yourself.'

'I don't feel quite sure whether I can trust you,' said Curdie.

'We are the king's own men-at-arms,' said the captain courteously,
for he was taken with Curdie's appearance and courage.

'Well, I will tell you all about it - if you will promise to listen
to me and not do anything rash.'

'I call that cool!' said one of the party, laughing.  'He will tell
us what mischief he was about, if we promise to do as pleases him.'

'I was about no mischief,' said Curdie.  -

But ere he could say more he turned faint, and fell senseless on
the grass.  Then first they discovered that the bolt they had shot,
taking him for one of the goblin creatures, had wounded him.

They carried him into the house and laid him down in the hall.  The
report spread that they had caught a robber, and the servants
crowded in to see the villain.  Amongst the rest came the nurse.
The moment she saw him she exclaimed with indignation:

'I declare it's the same young rascal of a miner that was rude to
me and the princess on the mountain.  He actually wanted to kiss
the princess.  I took good care of that - the wretch!  And he was
prowling about, was he?  Just like his impudence!' The princess
being fast asleep, she could misrepresent at her pleasure.

When he heard this, the captain, although he had considerable doubt
of its truth, resolved to keep Curdie a prisoner until they could
search into the affair.  So, after they had brought him round a
little, and attended to his wound, which was rather a bad one, they
laid him, still exhausted from the loss of blood, upon a mattress
in a disused room - one of those already so often mentioned - and
locked the door, and left him.  He passed a troubled night, and in
the morning they found him talking wildly.  In the evening he came
to himself, but felt very weak, and his leg was exceedingly
painful.  Wondering where he was, and seeing one of the men-at-arms
in the room, he began to question him and soon recalled the events
of the preceding night.  As he was himself unable to watch any
more, he told the soldier all he knew about the goblins, and begged
him to tell his companions, and stir them up to watch with tenfold
vigilance; but whether it was that he did not talk quite
coherently, or that the whole thing appeared incredible, certainly
the man concluded that Curdie was only raving still, and tried to
coax him into holding his tongue.  This, of course, annoyed Curdie
dreadfully, who now felt in his turn what it was not to be
believed, and the consequence was that his fever returned, and by
the time when, at his persistent entreaties, the captain was
called, there could be no doubt that he was raving.  They did for
him what they could, and promised everything he wanted, but with no
intention of fulfilment.  At last he went to sleep, and when at
length his sleep grew profound and peaceful, they left him, locked
the door again, and withdrew, intending to revisit him early in the
morning.



CHAPTER 26
The Goblin-Miners


That same night several of the servants were having a chat together
before going to bed.

'What can that noise be?' said one of the housemaids, who had been
listening for a moment or two.

'I've heard it the last two nights,' said the cook.  'If there were
any about the place, I should have taken it for rats, but my Tom
keeps them far enough.'

'I've heard, though,' said the scullery-maid, 'that rats move about
in great companies sometimes.  There may be an army of them
invading us.  I've heard the noises yesterday and today too.'

'It'll be grand fun, then, for my Tom and Mrs Housekeeper's Bob,'
said the cook.  'They'll be friends for once in their lives, and
fight on the same side.  I'll engage Tom and Bob together will put
to flight any number of rats.'

'It seems to me,' said the nurse, 'that the noises are much too
loud for that.  I have heard them all day, and my princess has
asked me several times what they could be.  Sometimes they sound
like distant thunder, and sometimes like the noises you hear in the
mountain from those horrid miners underneath.'

'I shouldn't wonder,' said the cook, 'if it was the miners after
all.  They may have come on some hole in the mountain through which
the noises reach to us.  They are always boring and blasting and
breaking, you know.'

As he spoke, there came a great rolling rumble beneath them, and
the house quivered.  They all started up in affright, and rushing
to the hall found the gentlemen-at-arms in consternation also.
They had sent to wake their captain, who said from their
description that it must have been an earthquake, an occurrence
which, although very rare in that country, had taken place almost
within the century; and then went to bed again, strange to say, and
fell -fast asleep without once thinking of Curdie, or associating
the noises they had heard with what he had told them.  He had not
believed Curdie.  If he had, he would at once have thought of what
he had said, and would have taken precautions.  As they heard
nothing more, they concluded that Sir Walter was right, and that
the danger was over for perhaps another hundred years.  The fact,
as discovered afterwards, was that the goblins had, in working up
a second sloping face of stone, arrived at a huge block which lay
under the cellars of the house, within the line of the foundations.

It was so round that when they succeeded, after hard work, in
dislodging it without blasting, it rolled thundering down the slope
with a bounding, jarring roll, which shook the foundations of the
house.  The goblins were themselves dismayed at the noise, for they
knew, by careful spying and measuring, that they must now be very
near, if not under the king's house, and they feared giving an
alarm.  They, therefore, remained quiet for a while, and when they
began to work again, they no doubt thought themselves very
fortunate in coming upon a vein of sand which filled a winding
fissure in the rock on which the house was built.  By scooping this
away they came out in the king's wine cellar.
No sooner did they find where they were, than they scurried back
again, like rats into their holes, and running at full speed to the
goblin palace, announced their success to the king and queen with
shouts of triumph.

In a moment the goblin royal family and the whole goblin people
were on their way in hot haste to the king's house, each eager to
have a share in the glory of carrying off that same night the
Princess Irene.

The queen went stumping along in one shoe of stone and one of skin.

This could not have been pleasant, and my readers may wonder that,
with such skilful workmen about her, she had not yet replaced the
shoe carried off by Curdie.  As the king, however, had more than
one ground of objection to her stone shoes, he no doubt took
advantage of the discovery of her toes, and threatened to expose
her deformity if she had another made.  I presume he insisted on
her being content with skin shoes, and allowed her to wear the
remaining granite one on the present occasion only because she was
going out to war.

They soon arrived in the king's wine cellar, and regardless of its
huge vessels, of which they did not know the use, proceeded at
once, but as quietly as they could, to force the door that led
upwards.


CHAPTER 27
The Goblins in the King's House


When Curdie fell asleep he began at once to dream.  He thought he
was ascending the Mountainside from the mouth of the mine,
whistling and singing 'Ring, dod, bang!' when he came upon a woman
and child who had lost their way; and from that point he went on
dreaming everything that had happened to him since he thus met the
princess and Lootie; how he had watched the goblins, how he had
been taken by them, how he had been rescued by the princess;
everything, indeed, until he was wounded, captured, and imprisoned
by the men-at-arms.  And now he thought he was lying wide awake
where they had laid him, when suddenly he heard a great thundering
sound.

'The cobs are coming!' he said.  'They didn't believe a word I told
them!  The cobs'll be carrying off the princess from under their
stupid noses!  But they shan't! that they shan't!'

He jumped up, as he thought, and began to dress, but, to his
dismay, found that he was still lying in bed.

'Now then, I will!' he said.  'Here goes!  I am up now!'

But yet again he found himself snug in bed.  Twenty times he tried,
and twenty times he failed; for in fact he was not awake, only
dreaming that he was.  At length in an agony of despair, fancying
he heard the goblins all over the house, he gave a great cry.  Then
there came, as he thought, a hand upon the lock of his door.  It
opened, and, looking up, he saw a lady with white hair, carrying a
silver box in her hand, enter the room.  She came to his bed, he
thought, stroked his head and face with cool, soft hands, took the
dressing from his leg, rubbed it with something that smelt like
roses, and then waved her hands over him three times.  At the last
wave of her hands everything vanished, he felt himself sinking into
the profoundest slumber, and remembered nothing more until he awoke
in earnest.

The setting moon was throwing a feeble light through the casement,
and the house was full of uproar.  There was soft heavy
multitudinous stamping, a clashing and clanging of weapons, the
voices of men and the cries of women, mixed with a hideous
bellowing, which sounded victorious.  The cobs were in the house!
He sprang from his bed, hurried on some of his clothes, not
forgetting his shoes, which were armed with nails; then spying an
old hunting-knife, or short sword, hanging on the wall, he caught
it, and rushed down the stairs, guided by the sounds of strife,
which grew louder and louder.

When he reached the ground floor he found the whole place swarming.

All the goblins of the mountain seemed gathered there.  He rushed
amongst them, shouting:


'One, two,
Hit and hew!
Three, four,
Blast and bore!'


and with every rhyme he came down a great stamp upon a foot,
cutting at the same time their faces - executing, indeed, a sword
dance of the wildest description.  Away scattered the goblins in
every direction - into closets, up stairs, into chimneys, up on
rafters, and down to the cellars.  Curdie went on stamping and
slashing and singing, but saw nothing of the people of the house
until he came to the great hall, in which, the moment he entered
it, arose a great goblin shout.  The last of the men-at-arms, the
captain himself, was on the floor, buried beneath a wallowing crowd
of goblins.  For, while each knight was busy defending himself as
well as he could, by stabs in the thick bodies of the goblins, for
he had soon found their heads all but invulnerable, the queen had
attacked his legs and feet with her horrible granite shoe, and he
was soon down; but the captain had got his back to the wall and
stood out longer.  The goblins would have torn them all to pieces,
but the king had given orders to carry them away alive, and over
each of them, in twelve groups, was standing a knot of goblins,
while as many as could find room were sitting upon their prostrate
bodies.
Curdie burst in dancing and gyrating and stamping and singing like
a small incarnate whirlwind.


'Where 'tis all a hole, sir,
Never can be holes:
Why should their shoes have soles, sir,
When they've got no souls?

'But she upon her foot, sir,
Has a granite shoe:
The strongest leather boot, sir,
Six would soon be through.'


The queen gave a howl of rage and dismay; and before she recovered
her presence of mind, Curdie, having begun with the group nearest
him, had eleven of the knights on their legs again.

'Stamp on their feet!' he cried as each man rose, and in a few
minutes the hall was nearly empty, the goblins running from it as
fast as they could, howling and shrieking and limping, and cowering
every now and then as they ran to cuddle their wounded feet in
their hard hands, or to protect them from the frightful stamp-stamp
of the armed men.
And now Curdie approached the group which, in trusting in the queen
and her shoe, kept their guard over the prostrate captain.  The
king sat on the captain's head, but the queen stood in front, like
an infuriated cat, with her perpendicular eyes gleaming green, and
her hair standing half up from her horrid head.  Her heart was
quaking, however, and she kept moving about her skin-shod foot with
nervous apprehension.  When Curdie was within a few paces, she
rushed at him, made one tremendous stamp at his opposing foot,
which happily he withdrew in time, and caught him round the waist,
to dash him on the marble floor.  But just as she caught him, he
came down with all the weight of his iron-shod shoe upon her
skin-shod foot, and with a hideous howl she dropped him, squatted
on the floor, and took her foot in both her hands.  Meanwhile the
rest rushed on the king and the bodyguard, sent them flying, and
lifted the prostrate captain, who was all but pressed to death.  It
was some moments before he recovered breath and consciousness.

'Where's the princess?' cried Curdie, again and again.

No one knew, and off they all rushed in search of her.

Through every room in the house they went, but nowhere was she to
be found.  Neither was one of the servants to be seen.  But Curdie,
who had kept to the lower part of the house, which was now quiet
enough, began to hear a confused sound as of a distant hubbub, and
set out to find where it came from.  The noise grew as his sharp
ears guided him to a stair and so to the wine cellar.  It was full
of goblins, whom the butler was supplying with wine as fast as he
could draw it.

While the queen and her party had encountered the men-at-arms,
Harelip with another company had gone off to search the house.
They captured every one they met, and when they could find no more,
they hurried away to carry them safe to the caverns below.  But
when the butler, who was amongst them, found that their path lay
through the wine cellar, he bethought himself of persuading them to
taste the wine, and, as he had hoped, they no sooner tasted than
they wanted more.  The routed goblins, on their way below, joined
them, and when Curdie entered they were all, with outstretched
hands, in which were vessels of every description from sauce pan to
silver cup, pressing around the butler, who sat at the tap of a
huge cask, filling and filling.  Curdie cast one glance around the
place before commencing his attack, and saw in the farthest corner
a terrified group of the domestics unwatched, but cowering without
courage to attempt their escape.  Amongst them was the
terror-stricken face of Lootie; but nowhere could he see the
princess.  Seized with the horrible conviction that Harelip had
already carried her off, he rushed amongst them, unable for wrath
to sing any more, but stamping and cutting with greater fury than
ever.

'Stamp on their feet; stamp on their feet!' he shouted, and in a
moment the goblins were disappearing through the hole in the floor
like rats and mice.
They could not vanish so fast, however, but that many more goblin
feet had to go limping back over the underground ways of the
mountain that morning.

Presently, however, they were reinforced from above by the king and
his party, with the redoubtable queen at their head.  Finding
Curdie again busy amongst her unfortunate subjects, she rushed at
him once more with the rage of despair, and this time gave him a
bad bruise on the foot.  Then a regular stamping fight got up
between them, Curdie, with the point of his hunting- knife, keeping
her from clasping her mighty arms about him, as he watched his
opportunity of getting once more a good stamp at her skin-shod
foot.  But the queen was more wary as well as more agile than
hitherto.

The rest meantime, finding their adversary thus matched for the
moment, paused in their headlong hurry, and turned to the shivering
group of women in the corner.  As if determined to emulate his
father and have a sun-woman of some sort to share his future
throne, Harelip rushed at them, caught up Lootie, and sped with her
to the hole.  She gave a great shriek, and Curdie heard her, and
saw the plight she was in.  Gathering all his strength, he gave the
queen a sudden cut across the face with his weapon, came down, as
she started back, with all his weight on the proper foot, and
sprung to Lootie's rescue.  The prince had two defenceless feet,
and on both of them Curdie stamped just as he reached the hole.  He
dropped his burden and rolled shrieking into the earth.  Curdie
made one stab at him as he disappeared, caught hold of the
senseless Lootie, and having dragged her back to the corner, there
mounted guard over her, preparing once more to encounter the queen.

Her face streaming with blood, and her eyes flashing green
lightning through it, she came on with her mouth open and her teeth
grinning like a tiger's, followed by the king and her bodyguard of
the thickest goblins.  But the same moment in rushed the captain
and his men, and ran at them stamping furiously.  They dared not
encounter such an onset.  Away they scurried, the queen foremost.
Of course, the right thing would have been to take the king and
queen prisoners, and hold them hostages for the princess, but they
were so anxious to find her that no one thought of detaining them
until it was too late.

Having thus rescued the servants, they set about searching the
house once more.  None of them could give the least information
concerning the princess.  Lootie was almost silly with terror, and,
although scarcely able to walk would not leave Curdie's side for a
single moment.  Again he allowed the others to search the rest of
the house - where, except a dismayed goblin lurking here and there,
they found no one - while he requested Lootie to take him to the
princess's room.  She was as submissive and obedient as if he had
been the king.

He found the bedclothes tossed about, and most of them on the
floor, while the princess's garments were scattered all over the
room, which was in the greatest confusion.  It was only too evident
that the goblins had been there, and Curdie had no longer any doubt
that she had been carried off at the very first of the inroad.
With a pang of despair he saw how wrong they had been in not
securing the king and queen and prince; but he determined to find
and rescue the princess as she had found and rescued him, or meet
the worst fate to which the goblins could doom him.



CHAPTER 28
Curdie's Guide


just as the consolation of this resolve dawned upon his mind and he
was turning away for the cellar to follow the goblins into their
hole, something touched his hand.  It was the slightest touch, and
when he looked he could see nothing.  Feeling and peering about in
the grey of the dawn, his fingers came upon a tight thread.  He
looked again, and narrowly, but still could see nothing.  It
flashed upon him that this must be the princess's thread.  Without
saying a word, for he knew no one would believe him any more than
he had believed the princess, he followed the thread with his
finger, contrived to give Lootie the slip, and was soon out of the
house and on the mountainside - surprised that, if the thread were
indeed the grandmother's messenger, it should have led the
princess, as he supposed it must, into the mountain, where she
would be certain to meet the goblins rushing back enraged from
their defeat.  But he hurried on in the hope of overtaking her
first.  When he arrived, however, at the place where the path
turned off for the mine, he found that the thread did not turn with
it, but went straight up the mountain.  Could it be that the thread
was leading him home to his mother's cottage?  Could the princess
be there?  He bounded up the mountain like one of its own goats,
and before the sun was up the thread had brought him indeed to his
mother's door.  There it vanished from his fingers, and he could
not find it, search as he might.

The door was on the latch, and he entered.  There sat his mother by
the fire, and in her arms lay the princess, fast asleep.

'Hush, Curdie!' said his mother.  'Do not wake her.  I'm so glad
you're come!  I thought the cobs must have got you again!'

With a heart full of delight, Curdie sat down at a corner of the
hearth, on a stool opposite his mother's chair, and gazed at the
princess, who slept as peacefully as if she had been in her own
bed.  All at once she opened her eyes and fixed them on him.

'Oh, Curdie! you're come!' she said quietly.  'I thought you
would!'

Curdie rose and stood before her with downcast eyes.

'Irene,' he said, 'I am very sorry I did not believe you.'

'Oh, never mind, Curdie!' answered the princess.  'You couldn't,
you know.  You do believe me now, don't you?'

'I can't help it now.  I ought to have helped it before.'

'Why can't you help it now?'

'Because, just as I was going into the mountain to look for you, I
got hold of your thread, and it brought me here.'

'Then you've come from my house, have you?'

'Yes, I have.'

'I didn't know you were there.'

'I've been there two or three days, I believe.'

'And I never knew it!  Then perhaps you can tell me why my
grandmother has brought me here?  I can't think.  Something woke me
- I didn't know what, but I was frightened, and I felt for the
thread, and there it was!  I was more frightened still when it
brought me out on the mountain, for I thought it was going to take
me into it again, and I like the outside of it best.  I supposed
you were in trouble again, and I had to get you out.  But it
brought me here instead; and, oh, Curdie! your mother has been so
kind to me - just like my own grandmother!'

Here Curdie's mother gave the princess a hug, and the princess
turned and gave her a sweet smile, and held up her mouth to kiss
her.

'Then you didn't see the cobs?'asked Curdie.

'No; I haven't been into the mountain, I told you, Curdie.'

'But the cobs have been into your house - all over it - and into
your bedroom, making such a row!'

'What did they want there?  It was very rude of them.'

'They wanted you - to carry you off into the mountain with them,
for a wife to their prince Harelip.'

'Oh, how dreadful' cried the princess, shuddering.

'But you needn't be afraid, you know.  Your grandmother takes care
of you.'

'Ah! you do believe in my grandmother, then?  I'm so glad!  She
made me think you would some day.'

All at once Curdie remembered his dream, and was silent, thinking.

'But how did you come to be in my house, and me not know it?' asked
the princess.

Then Curdie had to explain everything - how he had watched for her
sake, how he had been wounded and shut up by the soldiers, how he
heard the noises and could not rise, and how the beautiful old lady
had come to him, and all that followed.

'Poor Curdie! to lie there hurt and ill, and me never to know it!'
exclaimed the princess, stroking his rough hand.  'I would have
come and nursed you, if they had told me.'

'I didn't see you were lame,' said his mother.

'Am I, mother?  Oh - yes - I suppose I ought to be! I declare I've
never thought of it since I got up to go down amongst the cobs!'

'Let me see the wound,' said his mother.

He pulled down his stocking - when behold, except a great scar, his
leg was perfectly sound!

Curdie and his mother gazed in each other's eyes, full of wonder,
but Irene called out:

'I thought so, Curdie!  I was sure it wasn't a dream.  I was sure
my grandmother had been to see you.  Don't you smell the roses?  It
was my grandmother healed your leg, and sent you to help me.'

'No, Princess Irene,' said Curdie; 'I wasn't good enough to be
allowed to help you: I didn't believe you.  Your grandmother took
care of you without me.'

'She sent you to help my people, anyhow.  I wish my king-papa would
come.  I do want so to tell him how good you have been!'

'But,' said the mother, 'we are forgetting how frightened your
people must be.  You must take the princess home at once, Curdie -
or at least go and tell them where she is.'

'Yes, mother.  Only I'm dreadfully hungry.  Do let me have some
breakfast first.  They ought to have listened to me, and then they
wouldn't have been taken by surprise as they were.'

'That is true, Curdie; but it is not for you to blame them much.
You remember?'

'Yes, mother, I do.  Only I must really have something to eat.'

'You shall, my boy - as fast as I can get it,' said his mother,
rising and setting the princess on her chair.

But before his breakfast was ready, Curdie jumped up so suddenly as
to startle both his companions.

'Mother, mother!' he cried, 'I was forgetting.  You must take the
princess home yourself.  I must go and wake my father.'

Without a word of explanation, he rushed to the place where his
father was sleeping.  Having thoroughly roused him with what he
told him he darted out of the cottage.



CHAPTER 29
Masonwork


He had all at once remembered the resolution of the goblins to
carry out their second plan upon the failure of the first.  No
doubt they were already busy, and the mine was therefore in the
greatest danger of being flooded and rendered useless - not to
speak of the lives of the miners.
When he reached the mouth of the mine, after rousing all the miners
within reach, he found his father and a good many more just
entering.  They all hurried to the gang by which he had found a way
into the goblin country.  There the foresight of Peter had already
collected a great many blocks of stone, with cement, ready for
building up the weak place - well enough known to the goblins.
Although there was not room for more than two to be actually
building at once, they managed, by setting all the rest to work in
preparing the cement and passing the stones, to finish in the
course of the day a huge buttress filling the whole gang, and
supported everywhere by the live rock.  Before the hour when they
usually dropped work, they were satisfied the mine was secure.

They had heard goblin hammers and pickaxes busy all the time, and
at length fancied they heard sounds of water they had never heard
before.  But that was otherwise accounted for when they left the
mine, for they stepped out into a tremendous storm which was raging
all over the mountain.  The thunder was bellowing, and the
lightning lancing out of a huge black cloud which lay above it and
hung down  its edges of thick mist over its sides.  The lightning
was breaking out of the mountain, too, and flashing up into the
cloud.  From the state of the brooks, now swollen into raging
torrents, it was evident that the storm had been storming all day.

The wind was blowing as if it would blow him off the mountain, but,
anxious about his mother and the princess, Curdie darted up through
the thick of the tempest.  Even if they had not set out before the
storm came on, he did not judge them safe, for in such a storm even
their poor little house was in danger.  Indeed he soon found that
but for a huge rock against which it was built, and which protected
it both from the blasts and the waters, it must have been swept if
it was not blown away; for the two torrents into which this rock
parted the rush of water behind it united again in front of the
cottage - two roaring and dangerous streams, which his mother and
the princess could not possibly have passed.  It was with great
difficulty that he forced his way through one of them, and up to
the door.

The moment his hand fell on the latch, through all the uproar of
winds and Waters came the joyous cry of the princess:

'There's Curdie!  Curdie! Curdie!'

She was sitting wrapped in blankets on the bed, his mother trying
for the hundredth time to light the fire which had been drowned by
the rain that came down the chimney.  The clay floor was one mass
of mud, and the whole place looked wretched.  But the faces of the
mother and the princess shone as if their troubles only made them
the merrier.  Curdie burst out laughing at the sight of them.

'I never had such fun!' said the princess, her eyes twinkling and
her pretty teeth shining.  'How nice it must be to live in a
cottage on the mountain!'

'It all depends on what kind your inside house is,' said the
mother.

'I know what you mean,' said Irene.  'That's the kind of thing my
grandmother says.'

By the time Peter returned the storm was nearly over, but the
streams were so fierce and so swollen that it was not only out of
the question for the princess to go down the mountain, but most
dangerous for Peter even or Curdie to make the attempt in the
gathering darkness.

'They will be dreadfully frightened about you,' said Peter to the
princess, 'but we cannot help it.  We must wait till the morning.'

With Curdie's help, the fire was lighted at last, and the mother
set about making their supper; and after supper they all told the
princess stories till she grew sleepy.  Then Curdie's mother laid
her in Curdie's bed, which was in a tiny little garret-room.  As
soon as she was in bed, through a little window low down in the
roof she caught sight of her grandmother's lamp shining far away
beneath, and she gazed at the beautiful silvery globe until she
fell asleep.



CHAPTER 30
The King an the Kiss


The next morning the sun rose so bright that Irene said the rain
had washed his face and let the light out clean.  The torrents were
still roaring down the side of the mountain, but they were so much
smaller as not to be dangerous in the daylight.  After an early
breakfast, Peter went to his work and Curdie and his mother set out
to take the princess home.  They had difficulty in getting her dry
across the streams, and Curdie had again and again to carry her,
but at last they got safe on the broader part of the road, and
walked gently down towards the king's house.  And what should they
see as they turned the last corner but the last of the king's troop
riding through the gate!

'Oh, Curdie!' cried Irene, clapping her hands right joyfully,'my
king-papa is come.'

The moment Curdie heard that, he caught her up in his arms, and set
off at full speed, crying:

come on, mother dear!  The king may break his heart before he knows
that she is safe.'

Irene clung round his neck and he ran with her like a deer.  When
he entered the gate into the court, there sat the king on his
horse, with all the people of the house about him, weeping and
hanging their heads.  The king was not weeping, but his face was
white as a dead man's, and he looked as if the life had gone out of
him.  The men-at-arms he had brought with him sat with
horror-stricken faces, but eyes flashing with rage, waiting only
for the word of the king to do something - they did not know what,
and nobody knew what.
The day before, the men-at-arms belonging to the house, as soon as
they were satisfied the princess had been carried away, rushed
after the goblins into the hole, but found that they had already so
skilfully blockaded the narrowest part, not many feet below the
cellar, that without miners and their tools they could do nothing.
Not one of them knew where the mouth of the mine lay, and some of
those who had set out to find it had been overtaken by the storm
and had not even yet returned.  Poor Sir Walter was especially
filled with shame, and almost hoped the king would order his head
to be cut off, for to think of that sweet little face down amongst
the goblins was unendurable.

When Curdie ran in at the gate with the princess in his arms, they
were all so absorbed in their own misery and awed by the king's
presence and grief, that no one observed his arrival.  He went
straight up to the king, where he sat on his horse.

'Papa! papa!' the princess cried, stretching out her arms to him;
'here I am!'

The king started.  The colour rushed to his face.  He gave an
inarticulate cry.  Curdie held up the princess, and the king bent
down and took her from his arms.  As he clasped her to his bosom,
the big tears went dropping down his cheeks and his beard.  And
such a shout arose from all the bystanders that the startled horses
pranced and capered, and the armour rang and clattered, and the
rocks of the mountain echoed back the noises.  The princess greeted
them all as she nestled in her father's bosom, and the king did not
set her down until she had told them all the story.  But she had
more to tell about Curdie than about herself, and what she did tell
about herself none of them could understand - except the king and
Curdie, who stood by the king's knee stroking the neck of the great
white horse.  And still as she told what Curdie had done, Sir
Walter and others added to what she told, even Lootie joining in
the praises of his courage and energy.

Curdie held his peace, looking quietly up in the king's face.  And
his mother stood on the outskirts of the crowd listening with
delight, for her son's deeds were pleasant in her ears, until the
princess caught sight of her.

'And there is his mother, king-papa!' she said.  'See - there.  She
is such a nice mother, and has been so kind to me!'

They all parted asunder as the king made a sign to her to come
forward.  She obeyed, and he gave her his hand, but could not
speak.

'And now, king-papa,' the princess went on, 'I must tell you
another thing.  One night long ago Curdie drove the goblins away
and brought Lootie and me safe from the mountain.  And I promised
him a kiss when we got home, but Lootie wouldn't let me give it
him.  I don't want you to scold Lootie, but I want you to tell her
that a princess must do as she promises.'
'Indeed she must, my child - except it be wrong,' said the king.
'There, give Curdie a kiss.'

And as he spoke he held her towards him.

The princess reached down, threw her arms round Curdie's neck, and
kissed him on the mouth, saying: 'There, Curdie!  There's the kiss
I promised you!'

Then they all went into the house, and the cook rushed to the
kitchen and the servants to their work.  Lootie dressed Irene in
her shiningest clothes, and the king put off his armour, and put on
purple and gold; and a messenger was sent for Peter and all the
miners, and there was a great and a grand feast, which continued
long after the princess was put to bed.



CHAPTER 31
The Subterranean Waters


The king's harper, who always formed a part of his escort, was
chanting a ballad which he made as he went on playing on his
instrument - about the princess and the goblins, and the prowess of
Curdie, when all at once he ceased, with his eyes on one of the
doors of the hall.  Thereupon the eyes of the king and his guests
turned thitherward also.  The next moment, through the open doorway
came the princess Irene.  She went straight up to her father, with
her right hand stretched out a little sideways, and her forefinger,
as her father and Curdie understood, feeling its way along the
invisible thread.  The king took her on his knee, and she said in
his ear:

'King-papa, do you hear that noise?'

'I hear nothing,' said the king.

'Listen,' she said, holding up her forefinger.

The king listened, and a great stillness fell upon the company.
Each man, seeing that the king listened, listened also, and the
harper sat with his harp between his arms, and his finger silent
upon the strings.

'I do hear a noise,' said the king at length - 'a noise as of
distant thunder.  It is coming nearer and nearer.  What can it be?'

They all heard it now, and each seemed ready to start to his feet
as he listened.  Yet all sat perfectly still.  The noise came
rapidly nearer.

'What can it be?' said the king again.

'I think it must be another storm coming over the mountain,' said
Sir Walter.

Then Curdie, who at the first word of the king had slipped from his
seat, and laid his ear to the ground, rose up quickly, and
approaching the king said, speaking very fast:

'Please, Your Majesty, I think I know what it is.  I have no time
to explain, for that might make it too late for some of us.  Will
Your Majesty give orders that everybody leave the house as quickly
as possible and get up the mountain?'

The king, who was the wisest man in the kingdom, knew well there
was a time when things must be done and questions left till
afterwards.  He had faith in Curdie, and rose instantly, with Irene
in his arms.  'Every man and woman follow me,' he said, and strode
out into the darkness.

Before he had reached the gate, the noise had grown to a great
thundering roar, and the ground trembled beneath their feet, and
before the last of them had crossed the court, out after them from
the great hall door came a huge rush of turbid water, and almost
swept them away.  But they got safe out of the gate and up the
mountain, while the torrent went roaring down the road into the
valley beneath.

Curdie had left the king and the princess to look after his mother,
whom he and his father, one on each side, caught up when the stream
overtook them and carried safe and dry.

When the king had got out of the way of the water, a little up the
mountain, he stood with the princess in his arms, looking back with
amazement on the issuing torrent, which glimmered fierce and foamy
through the night.  There Curdie rejoined them.

'Now, Curdie,' said the king, 'what does it mean?  Is this what you
expected?'

'It is, Your Majesty,' said Curdie; and proceeded to tell him about
the second scheme of the goblins, who, fancying the miners of more
importance to the upper world than they were, had resolved, if they
should fail in carrying off the king's daughter, to flood the mine
and drown the miners.  Then he explained what the miners had done
to prevent it.  The goblins had, in pursuance of their design, let
loose all the underground reservoirs and streams, expecting the
water to run down into the mine, which was lower than their part of
the mountain, for they had, as they supposed, not knowing of the
solid wall close behind, broken a passage through into it.  But the
readiest outlet the water could find had turned out to be the
tunnel they had made to the king's house, the possibility of which
catastrophe had not occurred to the young miner until he had laid
his ear to the floor of the hall.

What was then to be done?  The house appeared in danger of falling,
and every moment the torrent was increasing.

'We must set out at once,' said the king.  'But how to get at the
horses!'

'Shall I see if we can manage that?' said Curdie.

'Do,' said the king.

Curdie gathered the men-at-arms, and took them over the garden
wall, and so to the stables.  They found their horses in terror;
the water was rising fast around them, and it was quite time they
were got out.  But there was no way to get them out, except by
riding them through the stream, which was now pouring from the
lower windows as well as the door.  As one horse was quite enough
for any man to manage through such a torrent, Curdie got on the
king's white charger and, leading the way, brought them all in
safety to the rising ground.

'Look, look, Curdie!' cried Irene, the moment that, having
dismounted, he led the horse up to the king.

Curdie did look, and saw, high in the air, somewhere about the top
of the king's house, a great globe of light shining like the purest
silver.

'Oh!' he cried in some consternation, 'that is your grandmother's
lamp!  We must get her out.  I will go an find her.  The house may
fall, you know.'

'My grandmother is in no danger,' said Irene, smiling.

'Here, Curdie, take the princess while I get on my horse,' said the
king.

Curdie took the princess again, and both turned their eyes to the
globe of light.  The same moment there shot from it a white bird,
which, descending with outstretched wings, made one circle round
the king an Curdie and the princess, and then glided up again.  The
light and the pigeon vanished together.

'Now, Curdie!' said the princess, as he lifted her to her father's
arms, 'you see my grandmother knows all about it, and isn't
frightened.  I believe she could walk through that water and it
wouldn't wet her a bit.'

'But, my child,' said the king, 'you will be cold if you haven't
Something more on.  Run, Curdie, my boy, and fetch anything you can
lay your hands on, to keep the princess warm.  We have a long ride
before us.'

Curdie was gone in a moment, and soon returned with a great rich
fur, and the news that dead goblins were tossing about in the
current through the house.  They had been caught in their own
snare; instead of the mine they had flooded their own country,
whence they were now swept up drowned.  Irene shuddered, but the
king held her close to his bosom.  Then he turned to Sir Walter,
and said:

'Bring Curdie's father and mother here.'

'I wish,' said the king, when they stood before him, 'to take your
son with me.  He shall enter my bodyguard at once, and wait further
promotion.'

Peter and his wife, overcome, only murmured almost inaudible
thanks.  But Curdie spoke aloud.

'Please, Your Majesty,' he said, 'I cannot leave my father and
mother.'

'That's right, Curdie!' cried the princess.  'I wouldn't if I was
you.'

The king looked at the princess and then at Curdie with a glow of
satisfaction on his countenance.

'I too think you are right, Curdie,' he said, 'and I will not ask
you again.  But I shall have a chance of doing something for you
some time.'

'Your Majesty has already allowed me to serve you,' said Curdie.

'But, Curdie,' said his mother, 'why shouldn't you go with the
king?  We can get on very well without you.'

'But I can't get on very well without you,' said Curdie.  'The king
is very kind, but I could not be half the use to him that I am to
you.  Please, Your Majesty, if you wouldn't mind giving my mother
a red petticoat!  I should have got her one long ago, but for the
goblins.'

'As soon as we get home,' said the king, 'Irene and I will search
out the warmest one to be found, and send it by one of the
gentlemen.'

'Yes, that we will, Curdie!' said the princess.  'And next summer
we'll come back and see you wear it, Curdie's mother,' she added.
'Shan't we, king-papa?'

'Yes, my love; I hope so,' said the king.

Then turning to the miners, he said:

'Will you do the best you can for my servants tonight?  I hope they
will be able to return to the house tomorrow.'

The miners with one voice promised their hospitality.
Then the king commanded his servants to mind whatever Curdie should
say to them, and after shaking hands with him and his father and
mother, the king and the princess and all their company rode away
down the side of the new stream, which had already devoured half
the road, into the starry night.



CHAPTER 32
The Last Chapter


All the rest went up the mountain, and separated in groups to the
homes of the miners.  Curdie and his father and mother took Lootie
with them.  And the whole way a light, of which all but Lootie
understood the origin, shone upon their path.  But when they looked
round they could see nothing of the silvery globe.

For days and days the water continued to rush from the doors and
windows of the king's house, and a few goblin bodies were swept out
into the road.

Curdie saw that something must be done.  He spoke to his father and
the rest of the miners, and they at once proceeded to make another
outlet for the waters.  By setting all hands to the work,
tunnelling here and building there, they soon succeeded; and having
also made a little tunnel to drain the water away from under the
king's house, they were soon able to get into the wine cellar,
where they found a multitude of dead goblins - among the rest the
queen, with the skin-shoe gone, and the stone one fast to her ankle
- for the water had swept away the barricade, which prevented the
men-at-arms from following the goblins, and had greatly widened the
passage.  They built it securely up, and then went back to their
labours in the mine.

A good many of the goblins with their creatures escaped from the
inundation out upon the mountain.  But most of them soon left that
part of the country, and most of those who remained grew milder in
character, and indeed became very much like the Scotch brownies.
Their skulls became softer as well as their hearts, and their feet
grew harder, and by degrees they became friendly with the
inhabitants of the mountain and even with the miners.  But the
latter were merciless to any of the cobs' creatures that came in
their way, until at length they all but disappeared.

The rest of the history of The Princess and Curdie must be kept for
another volume.





End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of The Princess and the Goblin