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