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